Children's pragmatic abilities were studied focusing on "requesting" in a group of 30 language impaired children (three to nine years old). There was a predominant usage of direct forms with only a slight increase of indirect ones in the older group. (Author/SEW)

Sensitivity to differences in lexical stress was studied in monolingual French-, German-, and Swedish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. For most discriminations the older children performed better, but for a trisyllabic discrimination not found in French, the older children performed less well, supporting an attunement theory of language…

A study investigating a mother's use of discussion of picture books as a language acquisition strategy is reported, and the usefulness of establishing routine items and constructions in such discussion is examined. Use of the situation-specific approach to studying input language is also discussed. (MSE)

Examines children's attraction to rhythm and rhyme of nursery rhymes and how these factors affect literacy. Discusses the connection between rhyme and reading and spelling acquisition. (HTH)

Provides a historical view of child language research, showing that investigations of child language have come full circle in their approach to gathering data. Discusses implications for teachers in encouraging children's progression to adult-like conversation. (HTH)

Presents a method and rationale for enhancing verbal learning in a typical reading-language arts lesson through personal and group generated images and associations. (FL)

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

Presents examples of young children using written language. Shows teachers and parents what they can learn from children's developing sense of written language. Suggests activities by which parents and teachers can spur child language development. (RL)

Analyzes the late babbling productions of a French child and compares them with data from similar studies of English and Thai children. Shows that although the French child and his English counterparts share some universal phonetic preferences, a selective, language-specific phonetic acquisition takes place during the babbling stage. (Author/MES)

Analyzes mother and child speech in free play conversation for different semantic and syntactic categories. Based on the study of changes taking place over time in children's use of semantic categories, argues against the hypothesis that the mother's speech is gradually adjusted to the child's performance. (Author/MES)

Investigates the role of pupil language in classroom learning through an ethnographic study of one "good" teacher and her class, particularly three average and above-average pupils. (HOD)

The variation of mean length of utterance, a linguistic measure, is explored among 50 normally developing three-, four-, and five-year-olds. It is suggested that mean length of utterance, as a measure of language status, is limited in differentiating language-impaired from normally developing children. (Author/SJL)

To help the classroom teacher identify speech problems in young children, the author presents some basic definitions and correction techniques, plus a chart of phonemes which normal children can articulate correctly at various ages. (SJL)

Third through ninth-grade students were asked to write an essay on the subject, "Why I like to read," to determine children's language in describing their purposes for reading, to gain some impressions of what functions and purposes might emerge, and to analyze whether particular functions appear at various developmental levels. (HOD)

Younger and older children were asked to label pictures of nonprototypic, container-like objects in an effort to test Nelson's theory regarding the primacy of the functional core in young children's meaning structures. Contrary to expectations, the older, intermediate age children were influenced more by functional context than were the younger,…