Discusses the establishment of a morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) index as opposed to the standard mean-length of utterance (MLU) for measuring the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. (EKN)

Errors in reading and speaking are not the result of failure to comprehend or communicate. Rather, such errors are "miscues," which show the effects of psycholinguistic processes that have taken unexpected turns. The nature of these miscues reveals the underlying cognitive schema that guide a person's comprehension and verbalization. (Author/SJL)

Presents a longitudinal study of six children which investigates the relationship between language development and the development of nonverbal representation. Concludes that the results suggest an interrelational hypothesis and proposes an interpretation in terms of reciprocal interaction between the two parameters. (Author/MES)

Describes ERIC resources that present research on children's language usage and development and that suggest activities for the promotion of language development. (ET)

The early and continued use of semantic, syntactic and contextual clues in recognizing mispronounced words was demonstrated in an experiment involving preschoolers, grade school students and college students. Errors in highly predictable words and contexts were most easily recognized by all regardless of reading ability. (PMJ)

If the basic operations hypothesis (EJ 184 227) is interpreted as a general principle governing acquisition of all movement rules, it may obscure the fact that children distinguish between unbounded and local rules. Error patterns support this distinction, lending credence to theories with separate status for the two rule types. (Author/RD)

Presents an outline for a theory of syntax acquisition, surveys other approaches to language acquisition, and addresses the following methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; and (3) the domain of the theory. (Author/AM)

Ninety children between the ages of three and six described objects which differed on three simultaneous dimensions, using adjective combinations appropriate to the dimensions. Each child performed an imitation, comprehension, and production task. (Author/CFM)

The present study is an attempt to apply a paradigm to the shift of verbal behavior before and after the age of seven in order to see if linguistic contexts affect verbal behavior differentially before seven or after seven. (Author/CFM)

Sentences were constructed in which the terms "before" and "after" were embedded in logically constrained and logically reversible sequences. The preschool children in the study found the constrained sentences easier to comprehend. (Author/CFM)

This article discusses a study by Segalowitz and Galang that reports results showing better mastery of patient-focus sentences than agent-focus sentences for Tagalog children. (CFM)

This article discusses the way in which children use tense to distinguish between different realities in games of pretend. (CFM)

Twenty-four normal, misarticulation-free second-grade children participated in tasks designed to test their ability to perceive misarticulations in contextual speech. Results indicate that children are able to successfully identify sentences in which misarticulated words occur in addition to specific misarticulated words within sentences. (SW)

The purpose of this study was to attempt to verify the theory of Taeschner and Volterra (1976) that bilingual children pass through three distinct phases while becoming perfectly bilingual. The 12 subjects were English-Italian bilingual children between the ages of 1.6 and 4.6. (CFM)

This study analyzes a corpus of 1500 sentences uttered by a child bilingual in Italian and German between the ages of 3.9 and 4.5. Only 89 sentences show instances of lexical interference. (CFM)