Ideas regarding the language needs of children from poverty areas and how best to meet these needs. (GB)

Author focuses on need to teach language classifications and meanings as well as the conventional skills of reading and writing. (MB)

The differences in language patterns resulting from disparate social backgrounds are discussed. (CK)

A paper presented at Anglo-American Seminar on Teaching English to the Linguistically Deprived (Walsall, England, June 1968). (Editor/RD)

Examines speech convergence as a primitive form of socialized speech. Discusses the extent of speech patter matching by three-year-old children and whether a talkative/reticence factor influenced degrees of convergence. (EKN)

Describes the acquisition of a set of nonverbal intentionally communicative behaviors for six preverbal infants followed longitudinally. Results show a trend for a set of communicative intentions to emerge in the following sequence: (1) protesting, (2) request for action, (3) request for object, (4) comment on action, (5) comment on object, and…

Describes a study that examines the pragmatic language functions used by school-age children during a structured dialog consisting of a question-answer paradigm. Develops a 10-category taxonomy to classify subjects' responses and finds the taxonomy to be effective in two ways: (1) the number of categories is sufficient, and (2) the interscorer…

It was hypothesized that children may experience more difficulty in interpreting "after" than "before" because the sentence typically used in comprehension tasks facilitates dependence on sentence-processing strategies effective with "before" sentences but only partially effective with "after" sentences. For…

Discusses a longitudinal and cross-sectional study of two- to three-year-olds' acquisition of noun pluralization patterns in Hebrew. Results indicate that children choose the plural morpheme according to the nature of the final syllable of the singular noun and not by the grammatical gender of the noun. (EKN)

Considers the possibility that infants from different linguistic backgrounds babble similarly. Results of an experiment show that Spanish- and English-learning babies produce predominantly CV syllables with voiceless, unaspirated plosive consonants. Vowel production is also similar. (EKN)

Children were asked to judge/correct sentences in which verb pairs, as predicates, could be associated with propositions or "arguments" which were obligatory for one verb and optional for the other. Results indicated gradual progression with age from initial ignorance to adultlike representation of obligatory and optional arguments for each verb.…

In interviews, children understood past forms equally well in reference to immediate and remote past but future forms better in reference to the immediate future. Immediacy of action and certainty of occurrence are suggested as early meaning components of future verb forms. (Author)

Reviews and compares the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky on the relationships between child language and thought, as presented in their respective works, "The Language and Thought of the Child" and "Thought and Language." (SJL)