Every speech community has a baby talk register (BT) of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features regarded as primarily appropriate for addressing young children and also for other displaced or extended uses. Much BT is analyzable as derived from normal adult speech (AS) by such simplifying processes as reduction, substitution, assimilation,…

A sixteen line poem in Spanish provides the text of this short booklet on the three meals of the day. Designed for use as supplementary reading materials for the elementary grade Spanish speaking child, the booklet was developed by students in the Bilingual Teacher Aide Program at Mesa Community College. Content and language have been controlled…

If Chicano children do not learn an alternative to their home dialect, the local Spanish with its heavy overlay of English will become the standard for bilingual Chicano youngsters. The Spanish language itself may soon be another cultural relic for many Spanish surnamed people in the United States. Bilingual education represents the obvious…

A discussion of word acquisition rates and strategies is based upon a 6-month case study of an Estonian-speaking child who gradually and systematically relaxed phonotactic constraints to allow greater complexity in word production. In addition to the cognitive tools of assimilation and accomodation as described by Piaget, the child used a further…

The nature and extent of code-mixing in the language acquisition process over a 12-month period was studied with a child growing up in a bilingual English-Chichewa (Bantu language) speaking home. Data are examined from age 18 1/2 months to 30 1/2 months. Definitions of code-switching are offered, and an analysis of code-mixing in the speech of the…

A one-year project to explore the use of children's language served as a basis for staff development through the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation. Children's conversations among themselves were observed and recorded within the classroom setting, and the content of the observations were used for planning curriculum and assessing children's…

This longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition analyzes the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes in a child bilingual in English and Chichewa (a Bantu lanugage of East Central Africa). The order of acquisition obtained is compared to that obtained by Brown (1973) for monolingual English speaking children and that…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…

Little is known about how children gain interpersonal access in settings where adults are not present or are unavailable. This study sought to describe children's strategies for access into and withdrawal from peer interactive episodes in a nursery school. Data were collected from direct observations of two groups of children. One group attended…

This study examined acquisition and development of children's social/symbolic and strategic communication abilities within a sociolinguistic model of communicative competence. The major theoretical perspective was derived from Mead's symbolic interactionism and the cognitive-developmental theories of Piaget and Werner. Role-taking was the central…

In this research monograph, several areas of disparity between child and adult grammar are examined to discover at what ages the child, who is on the border of adult language competence, achieves a certain mastery of complex syntactic structures. Chapters include (1) a discussion of current notions on the nature of the linguistic process and a…

This document reports an investigation of the developmental changes in the use of certain syntactic structures by white, monolingual, middle class five- and seven-year-olds, and of the differences between the syntax of young children and that used in beginning reading textbooks. Approximately half of the publication presents the methods and…

The collection of papers bearing on language and poverty comprising this book includes: "Some Preliminaries and Prospects" (F. Williams); "Teaching Reading in an Urban Negro School System" (J. Baratz); "A Sociolinguistic Approach to Socialization" (B. Bernstein); "Some Philosophical Influences Underlying Preschool Intervention for Disadvantaged…

During the summer of 1968 a special summer program in sociolinguistics ("Language, Society, and the Child") was held at the University of California, Berkeley. This program grew out of the research on "children's language acquisition in a variety of cultures" which has been underway at that institution for four years. Originally it was planned to…

This booklet offers practical, easy-to-read suggestions for teachers, paraprofessionals, and parents to help them understand language development and language disabilities. The first section highlights some of the factors involved in language development. The second section deals with some of the common causes for language disabilities and…