This document "attempts to provide a representative, undogmatic, and fairly thorough coverage of selected areas of the psycholinguistic literature which are not accurately covered in existing bibliographies." Because the authors feel that psycholinguistics consists of the study of the acquisition, production, and understanding of a natural…

Fifteen bilingual and 15 monolingual Head Start children, ranging in age from 4 to 6, were administered three types of tasks: (1) object constancy task: subject was shown a common object, a transformation was done on the object, e.g., crushing a paper cup, and then that object plus an identical pre-transformed object, were shown to the subject and…

Relatively little research has been done on the quantitative characteristics of children's word usage. This spoken count was undertaken to investigate those aspects of word usage and frequency which could cast light on lexical processes in grammar and verbal development in children. Three groups of 30 children each (boys and girls) from…

As a reference for future teachers and for those already working in the field of early childhood education, this book presents information about young children's language development, emphasizing language as the primary basis for reading acquisition. In the first section of the book, language growth during preschool years is explored, with…

Irregularities in oral fluency, or "disfluencies," are common in the speech habits of both children and adults. Disfluencies can take the form of hesitations, revisions, repetitions, or interjections. Most disfluenceies do not occur at random, but are directly linked to other factors such as verbal planning--the combination of decisions…

The pronunciations of children do not merely represent accidental misses with respect to adult pronunciation. Children employ substitutions and deletions in highly systematic ways; child pronunciations reflect a set of simplification strategies. The major common processes of both normal and abnormal child phonology result in simplification of…

This investigation compares child language obtained with standardized tests and samples of spontaneous speech obtained in natural settings. It was hypothesized that differences would exist between social class and racial groups on the unfamiliar standard tests, but such differences would not be evident on spontaneous speech measures. Also, higher…

This is a study of how children in a small community called Rosepoint, in the vicinity of New Orleans, acquire speech. The author provides essential contextualization for her problem, dealing with family composition, life space, means used to control children, and interaction between members of the household. The author made intensive observations…

Five studies investigated the interaction between language acquisition abilities and environmental factors. Subjects aged 5 to 20 imitated synthetic speech stimuli representing English and novel categories. All except the 5-year olds imitated better than was predicted from studies of categorical perception. The 12-year olds performed optimally.…

This paper considers the processes involved as children and adults learn a new language. For the child this can mean learning his native language. One difference between learning a language in a classroom and in a "live" situation is motivation toward communication. The child learning his mother tongue is highly motivated to communicate, as are…

This project began with a theory about the prediction of errors in childrens' attempts to pronounce utterances modeled for them by adults. Subjects were children from 15 to 54 months old in all positions in the family. The sample from each child was an unprompted utterance judged to be an attempt to say something in English. Differences between…

An attempt to answer questions surrounding the teaching of oral communication to children is presented. In each section, a pattern is followed. First comes the presentation of an example. Second, there is an explanation of the teaching efforts which led up to this oral product. Third, the author adds comments and raises questions to help the…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

This dissertation argues that the skill of using language to communicate should be based on the continuous development of the ability to use imagery, metaphor, and the inherently ambiguous nature of language. Since language is a symbolic restructuring of experience, any method designed to teach language arts must reflect the interplay between…

One of the most important capacities which children employ when learning language is the capacity to generalize. A child who hears an utterance of a verbal expression while perceiving a particular object (or action, aspect, etc.) becomes normally able to apply the expression not only to this object but also to all those objects which, for him, are…