To explore the effects of the use of sign language as an intervention technique to facilitate the development of expressive and receptive communication skills, manual sign language (Signing Exact English) was employed with 12 multihandicapped, language delayed and/or nonverbal Ss (18 to 36 months old). Sign language was studied both as a…

Six Samoan children ranging in age from 2 to 16 were the subjects of a study to document the spontaneous production of the deictic verbs "sau" ("to come") and "aumai" ("to bring/give"). "Aumai" appears to be used before "sau" and is generally used more frequently than "sau." Imperatives with "aumai" tend to be directed to higher status persons or…

This review of research into the acquisition of grammatical coordination (i.e., the use of conjunctions) pulls together both English language and cross-linguistic data. Although the importance of pragmatic factors in language acquisition is not denied, the data make it clear that grammatical factors seem to play a significant role in the…

The speech of two two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children was taped during free play in their homes. The following characteristics of their speech were discovered: (1) excellent, near full control of tones; (2) somewhat stricter word order than is found in adult speech (Mandarin is undergoing a word order shift from SVO to SOV); and (3) few…

The spontaneous speech of 14 children aged 2;6 to 5;6 was recorded. One additional child provided longitudinal information from age 2;4 to 5;6. In a second study, 75 children were tested for mastery of hypothetical reference in a story-telling situation. The speech samples from Study 1 and the children's answers from Study 2 were analyzed for…

Narratives about personal experiences were elicited from 33 kindergarten children in a suburb of Zurich. The narratives were analyzed for the development of the use of the particle "ebe" from a conversational context (where the use of the particle was already mastered) to an appropriate narrative context (in which the particle, as…

By giving assignments to children in a field that inquires into the nature of language use, teachers can help enhance their total language development and sensitivity to language. To be most effective, such projects should involve children working interactively in groups; should require considerable time to complete and involve the solving of…

This report, the third in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, describes a study designed to determine how the massive exposure to television affects children's language development. A total of 153 children in grades K-6 were interviewed about the entertainment, informational, and advertising content of 24 programs…

This guide outlines in chart form the speech, hearing, and language behaviors which may be expected from children of ages 3 months through 5 years. It is designed to indicate progress and to alert parents and professional personnel to deviations from normal development. The information, in question-answer form, sketches behaviors for nine age…

A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

The purpose of this study was to identify and provide normative data for weighting of those nonstandard linguistic features that make up deaf English. Subjects were prelingually or congenitally deaf high school students from the California School for the Deaf and a control group of normal-hearing fourth graders from a California public school.…

This paper attempts to demonstrate that children do not necessarily acquire fricatives before affricates. It begins with a summary and explanation of relevant parts of R. Jakobson's general theory of phonological acquisition. In part 2, an account of one child's acquisition of English affricates and fricatives is presented. In the period studied,…

When sound takes on meaning for the first time in the life of a child, a giant and prototypic step in the development of his symbolic capacities has taken place. This step is worthy of careful scientific scrutiny. This paper seeks first to describe the steps by which the author's child discovered the existence of meaning in sound, and second, to…

This booklet contains abstracts of 62 documents published by the Johns Hopkins University Center for the Study of Social Organization of Schools from September 1967 to May 1970. The majority of the documents are research studies in the areas of desegregation, language development, educational opportunity, and educational games--most of them…

This book on the growth of word meaning in children focuses on the development of the appreciation of the relations that exist among twenty selected words as the individual matures from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The four preconceptions which determined the experimental tasks, the set of words used, and the methods of analysis…