The effect of three model variables on student performance of syntactic and semantic language behaviors in the absence of direct or vicarious reinforcement was examined. Subjects were sixth-grade students of both sexes attending New Mexico Schools. Half of the subjects and models were Chicanos and half were Anglos. (BJG)

A study examined the type of Wh question (those introduced by who, what, when, where, why, or how) and the phrase structure rules required for the verb phrase to determine how they relate to the acquisition and development of the Wh question transformation. Children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were given three tasks, each containing 36…

The use of the term "strategy" in second language communication is discussed, and a typology of communication strategies is presented. Communication strategies are those systematic devices a second language learner uses in attempting to express precise meaning in the target language. Definitions of learning strategies and communication strategies…

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

The purpose of this research was to assess the validity of recent claims that experimenter-provided pictures facilitate young children's oral prose learning. The major question of interest was whether the pictures do nothing more than prompt the child to process the just presented information one more time, Three experiments were designed to test…

This paper reviews work done since January 1972 in children's language acquisition and development. It is divided into the following sections: (1) a brief summary of descriptive studies of adult and child speech, (2) a review of the results of three types of manipulative studies, and (3) a discussion of J. Gruber's interpretation of early…

Perception and production data were collected from 28 children, ages 1 year 8 months to 3 years 11 months to test four specific hypotheses on the acquisition of initial fricatives and glides in English, based on the assumptions that perception precedes production and unmarked precedes marked. Perception data were collected by the Shvachkin-Garnica…

This paper begins with a discussion of the meaning and importance of error analysis in language teaching and learning. The practical implications of what error analysis is for the classroom teacher are discussed, along with several possible systems for classifying learner errors. The need for the language teacher to establish certain priorities in…

This paper suggests that the main reason for the failure of many children to learn to read may be that reading programs often require the child to begin reading before he has developed oral language skills. By 3 years of age the child has acquired almost all the linguistic rules needed to produce basic, or kernel, sentences, which consist of…

The author outlines the construction of a somewhat different machine than that envisioned by Turing (with which it would be possible to converse, presumably by telephone or telegraph, and which would be capable of masquerading as a human being). The machine envisaged by the author would be capable of doing comprehension exercises. Such a machine…

The problems of the education of the aurally handicapped were discussed in speeches presented at the convention of the Council for Exceptional Children in Chicago, 1970. Papers reported include a suggested approach to the evaluation of expressive oral syntactic competence of the aurally handicapped child by Jean Lehman, the language of children…