In order to verify claims made by Genevan researchers that linguistic production but not comprehension capabilities distinguish seriators from nonseriators, three tasks were administered to children between the ages of four and eight. Subjects were asked to arrange in order objects varying in size, to describe how the objects differed from each…

Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an…

This paper is divided into two sections related to an experimental program in English for black Americans. The first section is a report describing the program. In 1969, approximately 150 black students from urban ghettos in the North and rural communities in the South were admitted to the University of Wisconsin under a special scholarship…

A conceptual category approach to the study of the comprehension of natural language is presented as an alternative to previous approaches made solely in terms of information gain or specific linguistic variables. Elementary school children between the ages of 6 and 11 years were given a referent identification task to test their comprehension of…

Some of the assertions made by Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" are considered. In particular, the notion of a "competence" model in linguistics is criticized. Formal postulates for a conceptually-based linguistic theory are presented. (Author/JD)

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

Previous studies have defined the earliest stage of child language to be the stage at which an uninitiated speaker of adult language can understand sentences spoken by the child. Upon the examination of the language of one child, aged 1 year and 7 months, it became evident that she could talk, even though it was equally evident that she didn't use…

This paper concerns the question of linguistic deficiency in the bilingual setting. The author believes that language is a uniquely human phenomenon developing mainly in response to maturation in the midst of confusing linguistic input, varying in style and language according to situation. However, there seems to be no reason to expect the…

This conference report is centered on that phase of the Targeted Research and Development Program in Reading literature search dealing with language development as it relates to reading. Models of language acquisition, hypotheses derived from the models, and comparisons of synthesized models are discussed. Among them are behaviorist (Skinner),…

This volume of instructional materials in Czech contains 145 dictation exercises. The exercises, designed for use with students at the Defense Language Institute, are used primarily to develop aural comprehension in the target language. The exercises are presented in segments allowing for repetition and with pauses for transcription or…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…

Registers--language varieties set apart from other varieties by the social circumstances of their use--are linguistic universals operating in all speech communities. Ghetto black children learn to control registers pertinent to the domain of family and neighborhood--most of which are spoken in their vernacular. Ghetto children are also expected to…

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…

Examines the Monitor Model of adult second language acquisition, and presents an alternate model that avoids difficulties inherent in the Monitor Model and that corresponds to contemporary language development theory. (Author/AM)

Research results of some difficulties of teaching English as a second language at the University of Compiegne (France) indicate that the target group was not well researched, their motivations and needs were not precisely analyzed, and the pedagogical approach used was nearly equivalent to that of the secondary school system. Includes response to…