The primary purpose of this book is to offer suggestions and writing examples for use in teaching children to write poetry. Each of the 15 chapters deals with a particular subject that could be useful in introducing poetry writing to students. The chapters discuss such topics as developing word consciousness in children, writing cinquains and…

This is a preliminary report on the testing of two hypotheses related to the acquisition of Spanish phonemes, namely that in the nasal series, production of the labial is acquired before the dental, followed by the velar; and that the liquid series, containing "l", "r", and trilled "r" (rr) will be the last class of sounds to be acquired. These…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

Language samples of 15 young normal children actively engaged in learning base syntax were compared with samples of 15 linguistically deviant children of a comparable linguistic level. Mean number of morphemes per utterance was used to determine linguistic level. The two groups were matched according to five linguistic levels previously…

This paper reports on a study of two girls about one year of age, part of a longitudinal study of the development of consonants by children learning their first language. Data are compared with a third child whose progress has been previously documented. Phone classes were grouped and phone trees analyzed for each child. A high level of…

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…

This paper argues that Mexican-American bilinguals are in danger of becoming victims of a double-deficit theory, i.e., they are erroneously considered by some to be deficient in both their languages. An article by Joseph H. Matluck and Betty J. Mace that takes the double-deficit viewpoint is refuted as being damaging to Mexican-American children.…

This paper discusses the interpretation of data on two types of phonological change: change in language over time in the culture, and change in the development of the individual speaker; and examines the position that these two sorts of change interact in a certain way in relation to phonological structure. If one conceives of phonology as a…

Keeping vocabulary and content constant, it was determined whether syntactically more complex structures increase reading difficulty or whether all students, regardless of grade level, have the same syntactic skills and thus read with equal facility materials written at different syntactic maturity levels. One hundred and twenty randomly selected…

The author initially cites the associationistic position of Spiker and the perceptual learning position of E. Gibson and concludes that the existing data does not clearly support either hypothesis. He describes a new approach designed to test these explanations of the role of verbal pretraining on subsequent discrimination learning. It consists of…

An investigation of response associations to 100 structural and lexical words was conducted in such a way as to observe commonalities of responses to the words, effects of sex differences on the commonalities, and effects of word learnability on the commonalities. Subjects were 80 white urban disadvantaged children, all 5 years old, divided into…

One of the essential differences between teaching a first and a second language is that the former is merely learned whereas the latter must usually be taught. This difference, while not absolute, still has enormous consequences. Although the "natural method" of second-language teaching is often championed, there is no way whereby the…

The study of verbal behavior has a long history in the Soviet Union, and some of the studies, especially those related to verbal conditioning and learning, have had considerable impact on Western research, particularly in the United States. The view set forth in this paper is that "voluntary behavior" is only that behavior which is…

This booklet contains four articles that discuss factors influencing language growth. The first, "The Child's Equipment for Language Growth" by Charlotte Wells, examines what the child needs for language learning, how the child uses his equipment for language growth, and what school factors facilitate the child's use of his equipment for language…