Discusses a study of the relationship between context and a mother's speech to her prelinguistic infant and a second phase which involved 48 mothers and their infants. Results are discussed in relation to a hypothesis that assumes that mothers' speech is determined by particular interactive rules operating in the mother-infant dyad. (Author/SED)

Describes a study of preschool children's utterances and their context, intended to provide evidence of children's argumentative capacities. Shows how children, though perhaps not consciously, use language to intervene upon reality in order to modify a state of things by sensibly arguing their case. (SED)

Investigates the development of communicative competence during preschool age by analyzing certain types of communicative acts and sequences of communicative acts in adult-child and child-child communication. Assumes there are certain phases in which a child is especially prepared for the acquisition of certain types of communicative acts. (SED)

Reports on a study of the language acquisition of a group of Portuguese children who belonged to two socioeconomic backgrounds: upper middle class and lower class. Aims to show that verbal formulation, referential non-linguistic material pragmatic cues, and cognitive factors play decisive roles in language development. (SED)

Demonstrates through a case study and a participant observation study that siblings interact about television in such a way that the form and content of their talk creates a learning context. Concludes that, despite concerns about "zombie" viewers, children are not passive, unresponsive recipients of television. (PD)

Focuses on the narrative function to show how children can build on another speaker's turns in conversation and can build on their own utterances as they speak. Analyzes children's dialogs and narratives to highlight the primacy of the oral language arts as they are enacted in daily conversation and play. (HTH)

Describes a two-day residence in a fifth- and sixth-grade classroom of poet Arnold Adoff. Presents his interaction with five students as they struggle with their poetry writing. (HTH)

Defines exploratory language as that used to explore thoughts rather than for starting already thought of ideas, then shows how three 10th-grade students profited from exploratory writing for different reasons. (FL)

Relates some of the observations made of a kindergarten classroom over a two-year period in which teachers simulated as many conditions as possible with respect to a natural "learning-how-to-write" situation. (HOD)

Describes a study in which nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals and then participated in an oral task designed to determine their competence in listener adapted communication. (FL)

Provides a look at primary grade children's abilities, inabilities, and requirements to use phonics as a beginning reading strategy and suggests a model that facilitates children's application of phonics while reading. (FL)

Considers register (factors that vary in situational contexts and produce differences in meaning intent and meaning exchange) variance with its accompanying language transactions during written language events involving children and adults. Illustrates register variance with the writing and drawing of a four-year-old and a first-grader. (HTH)

Examines results of a study of samples of babbling production of 6, 8, and 10-month-old infants from French, Arabic, and Cantonese backgrounds. Various judges were asked to identify those infants from their own linguistics community, with the intention of supporting hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of metaphonological characteristics…

Expands on study by Brown and Hanlon which showed that parents seemed more attuned to semantic value of their child's speech rather than grammatical form. However, this more recent study suggests that language learning environment presents subtle cues, distinguishing between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, evidenced by mothers' inclinations…

Investigates expression of part-whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years old and indicates that older children prefer its use significantly more often. The part-whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms, such as partitive, spatial, and possessive. Age, experimental task format, or type of experimental…