Five experiments were performed in which nursery school children were taught to identify persons, animals, or objects in pictures that took the nominative, objective, or locative case in sentences about the pictures. Inferences are made about categories in children's thinking including animate, and actor and agent. (CTM)

This article discusses an abnormal type of speech in the Cocopa language called animal talk, which deals with how humans refer to the communication between humans and animals and between animals themselves. The derivation of animal talk from normal speech and speech of mythical animals is discussed. (NCR)

Compares discussion in teacherless small group with that in a class lesson. (AA)

To explore the relationship of language use and speech adaptation to role and context, the spontaneous speech of a 5-year-old boy was recorded in three different situations: playing alone, playing with a friend of the same age, and playing with his mother. (Author/SW)

This article describes a series of experiments concerning the relationship between cognitive processes and learning a second language. Similarities and differences between first language acquisition and second language learning by children and adults are discussed. (CFM)

A description of a study whose object was to analyze the oral language used in class by nine-year-olds from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. The procedure, results and the linguistic characteristics according to situation are described. Several statistical tables are provided. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Ability to distinguish "ask" and "tell" in Spanish was studied with five groups of native Spanish speakers: adults, 7- and 10-year-olds in a full bilingual school and 7- and 10-year-olds in a non-total bilingual school. Increased age, bilingual schooling and presence of contextual clues enhanced performance. (CHK)

Preschool children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either "before" or "after." Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences than for arbitrarily ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of "before" and "after" must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support.…

In retelling 20 stories, 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causation-implied utterances. Other results are discussed. (Author/RM)

The analysis of videotaped, naturally occurring, adult-child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The importance of these demands, their nature, how adults deal with them, and their effects on children's communicative development are discussed. (CHK)

Examination of the types of linguistic knowledge that affect three- to nine-year-olds' (N=60) and adults' (N=12) ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew revealed that comprehension was achieved ahead of production. Knowledge of morphological form had little effect on comprehension, but was crucial to production. (Author/CB)

Hungarian-Russian bilingual preschoolers, in general, paid more attention to allomorphy than did monolingual Hungarian or Russian peers in interpreting transitive sentences with varying word orders. (Author/CB)

Longitudinal observation of 12 infants, including measures of child behavior and maternal language and child language, revealed that most subjects acquired a balanced distribution of object labels and social-centered words and phrases. (Author/CB)

An investigation into the linguistic adaptation process of foreign children adopted by Dutch-speaking families in Belgium identified a short, early adaptation period followed by a period of further acquisition, with marked differences between children younger and older than three years. (Author/CB)

Identification of correctly produced and misarticulated /w,r,l,j/ was examined in 12 children, aged 3:6-7:5. The children, their parents, and raters were more successful in identifying correctly produced semivowels than misarticulated ones. Both normal children with developmental substitutions and articulation-impaired children demonstrated…