Although children's oral language has been a focus of interest and inquiry through the 20th century, current investigations document research with literature of more recent decades to support investigations, theoretical design, or philosophical approach. The developmental nature of the literature, with marked changes in theory and methods of child…

A study of bilingual development in preschool children had two components: (1) a followup of a previous study in which the English and Spanish language development of children in a high-quality bilingual preschool remained stable over time, and (2) a replication of the study with a different cohort. The original study found that native…

There are clear differences in acquisition and developmental patterns between conversational language and academic language, or BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency). The conceptual distinction between these two levels highlights misconceptions about the nature of language proficiency…

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information such as temporal synchrony to learn arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infants learned the relations between spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and two moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. Two experiments examined infants' memory for these relations. In…

Based upon the view that parents, home visitors, and teachers in early childhood settings need tools for empowering young children to develop language, this paper examines what adults need to know to guide young children's language development and presents 20 suggestions for enhancing language growth. The paper maintains that adults need to know…

Reviews research using sentence length as a factor in predicting readability and discusses the possibility of sentence complexity as a more accurate variable. (TO)

Stresses that a teacher needs to listen to children more, that a child must learn school language and how to ask questions to which the teacher then responds. A discussion of child language and linguistic theory is included. (TO)

Discusses the belief that meaning is primary to a child learning language and concludes that teachers should develop language programs in which the use of language would be essential rather than incidental. (RL)

Study arose out of the need for a functional analysis of the language of young children which might lead to an understanding of how language and context interact to produce differentiated speech, and what interpersonal situations were most fruitful in eliciting good communication. (Authors/CB)

Revised and abridged version of You Can't Learn without Goofing (An Analysis of Children's Second Language Errors')'' to appear in Jack Richards (ed.), Error Analysis -- Perspectives in Second Language Acquisition,'' (Longmans). A goof'' is a productive error made during the language learning process. (RS)

Although critical of some of the claims made for contrastive analysis in the past, this article treats contrastive analysis as a useful pursuit which can contribute to language learning. (FB)