Discusses relevance of language acquisition and use to educational practice and the student's school performance. (GB)

Explores the importance of encouraging children to play with language, to use it as an art medium, to experiment with sounds and words, and to extend meanings. (Author/AJ)

McCaig's article, "How Not To Analyze the Syntax of Children," appears in this issue, pp. 612-18. (SW)

Reviews some of the principal phenomena that have been found to characterize the acquisition of word meaning during the first two years of life, and proposes a theoretical framework which can be used to interpret these phenomena. (MP)

A brief history of the study of language acquisition is followed by a detailed discussion of two subareas: metalinguistic thinking and the development of literacy. (MP)

Two experiments were conducted to test Chinese children's comprehension of count-and mass-classifiers. Participants were Chinese-speaking children ages 3 thru 8, plus 16 adults. Results cohere with the linguistic analysis that the count-mass distinction is relevant in Chinese grammar. Results also cohere with the current theory in cognitive…

Reports on experiments investigating children's knowledge of the constraints on ellipsis constructions in English, focusing on subtle contrasts between verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) and VP-anaphora (VPA). Results from parallel experiments employing the same stimuli but with different methodologies show that young children can correctly distinguish…

A review of studies on children's syntactic development in Spanish focused on their use of subordinate clauses within complex sentences. Results suggested that, although they made some developmental gains from 2 years of age, 10-year-olds had not acquired the full range of semantic and syntactic expression characteristic of adult use of…

Examines phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling of infants from 7 to 11 months of age. The investigation was to verify assumptions that, in infant vocal development, there is a systematic increase in the phonetic variation of these babbles, and separate stages of repetitive and nonrepetitive babbling are posited. (22 references) (GLR)

Challenges the position of Clark (1988) that no two forms in a language can mean the same thing. An alternative is offered that draws on the drive towards the adult system, development of nonlinguistic concepts, acquisition of language in context, and use of a cooperative principle in conversational exchanges. (64 references) (Author/CB)

Children's ability to distinguish between the text (what was said) and the intentional structure (what was meant) was interrogated by means of verbatim and paraphrase questions in two types of discourse: narratives and nursery rhymes. (Author/VWL)

Two studies of children's conversational language abilities are reported. In the first, mean length of utterance (MLU) and lexical diversity (D) were examined in a group of typically developing Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Regression analyses indicated a significant linear relationship between MLU and age (R = .44) and a significant…

This study describes the language and literacy skills of 11-year-olds attending a mainstream school in an area of social and economic disadvantage. The proportion of these young people experiencing difficulties in decoding and reading comprehension was identified and the relationship between spoken language skills and reading comprehension…

Purpose: Onset of canonical babbling by 10 months of age is surprisingly robust in infancy, suggesting that there must be deep biological forces that keep the development of this key vocal capability on course. This study further evaluated the robustness of canonical babbling and other aspects of prelinguistic vocal development. Method:…