Defines criteria to identify children's language overextensions and investigates how young children in the early stages of language acquisition rename objects analogically during a standardized play situation. Results indicate that analogic extensions are well within the capabilities of children from one year, eight months to two years, four…

Describes one child's early productions of lexical primary stress, using as a framework the following questions: (1) Is conventional stress used consistently? (2) Are there other alternatives for the placement of primary stress? (3) Does stress assignment appear to be random? (4) Does stress assignment appear to vary with spontaneous vs. imitative…

Presents a case study of the babbling monologues produced by a Dutch child in the six weeks following acquisiton of the first word, which shows that this child's word production and his concurrent babbling are very much related. Concludes that word production influences the course of babbling and vice versa. (SED)

Discusses the types of revision second-grade students conducted on their writing that, at first, were not obvious to the teacher. These include revision in an individual conference with the teacher and revising by expanding a journal entry. (HTH)

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Investigates the extent to which children develop the ability to comprehend and explain literal and idiomatic meanings as a function of age and sex. (EKN)

Examined effects of direct intervention on language learning. Using a toy manipulation task, 18 children aged 3;6 to 4;6 were systematically taught linguistic structures beyond their developmental grasp. Solid improvement was found in the experimental conditions; no significant improvement was noted in control conditions, showing that the language…

Argues that bicultural education is necessary in meeting the language needs of Mexican-American students. (RB)

Two tasks were used to test predictions of the Semantic Feature Hypothesis (SFH) about children's comprehension of the meaning of spatial adjectives. Predictions about acquisition order for dimensional features were supported; predictions about polarity were not. An acquisition hypothesis is offered that is contrary to the SFH. (Author/RM)

The use of the verbs "go" and "come" was examined in the spontaneous speech of seven two-year-olds. As verbs of motion, the words were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This is considered crucial in explaining children's difficulty in discriminating the verbs in…

People explore their world in many ways: they observe, they read, they ponder, they write, they listen. They also turn to others and intentionally engage them in their own attempts to understand. It is this turning-to-others that is the focus of this book, with reference to children. An act of inquiry is defined in the book as "a language act…

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

Describes a program geared to helping children learn to attach the verbal symbol to its particular motoric response so the child will know specifically what to do under a given verbal instruction. (TO)

A nursery school teacher shares some of her collection of spontaneous language phrases of preschoolers, and shows how they reflect the characteristics of what Piaget calls the natural reasoning processes of young children. (CS)