This study documents the emerging ability of children to use demonstrative expressions and definite and indefinite articles in order to establish a clear reference for the hearer in a natural discourse situation. The analysis is based primarily on transcripts of twins recorded over a period of nine months when they were 33 to 42 months old.…

This study tests a proposition derived from Wittgenstein's theory of language development, which suggests that a social activity framework shared by interacting members serves two primary functions. Just as the activity framework prepares the child to comprehend speech relevant to the shared activity, (Function One), so it prepares the parent to…

This paper reports on an investigation of the voice-onset-time (VOT) characteristics of word-initial stops produced by four four-year-old children. Instrumental analysis of the children's spontaneous speech showed that they had distinct distributions for voiced and voiceless stops at all three places of articulation and that there was very little…

This paper presents a neo-Piagetian model for examining the development of early communication and language skills; discusses its origins in the current developmental literature, and provides a brief overview of a preliminary version of 12 scales developed for assessing communicative development based on the model. The model attempts to provide a…

The study described in this paper focuses on English language acquisition by adult Hmong Laotian immigrants in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program in a city in the Northeastern United States. Preexistent levels of literacy and second language familiarity are discounted as influences on the speed of students' acquisition of language.…

Four age levels of 80 learning disabled (LD) students (7.5-8.11, 9.0-10.5, 10.6-11.11, and 12.0-13.5 years) participated in an examination of syntactic maturity and vocabulary richness in their oral language. Ss were shown two films without the sound turned on, and were then tape recorded as they told the story of the film in their own words.…

In the current debate about the development of language in children, the author agrees with those psycholinguists who emphasize the role of "imitation followed by analogical extension." That is to say, that if there are inborn discovery procedures for the acquisition of language, they are distributional rather than transformational in nature. On…

One hundred fifty children in first, second, and third grade participated in a study of the relationships between written language variables in narrative and expository writing and reading comprehension. The seven written language variables investigated included mean length of T-unit and the ratios of various sentence-combining transformations to…

This paper reviews some of the observations made by Vygotsky about the structure and content of inner speech and its precursor egocentric speech, also called private speech. Recent advances in certain areas of linguistics are used to clarify and develop these observations. In particular, the paper focuses on Vygotsky's ideas about the predicative…

Ninety-three third and 78 fifth grade students participated in this study of the effectiveness of four methods of teaching word meanings: association method, category method, context method, and dictionary practice. Students were taught twelve words a week for eight weeks, with the performance score on weekly evaluation tasks as the dependent…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…

This study investigated the relationships between teacher facilitative or directive verbal behavior in nursery school classrooms and seven aspects of child language change. Twenty-eight nursery teachers and 95 children from these classrooms were selected for this study. The teacher verbal behavior was measured by the Withall Social Climate Index,…

Contrary to earlier assertions, young children do not interpret the word "different" to mean "same." Both two-and-a-half year old children and adults interpret requests for same or different objects appropriately, apparently following conventions of conversational discourse. These data offer no support for a discrete semantic feature model of…

The structure and organization of the first four levels of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Drama and Public Speaking Program to be tried out in 1972-1973 are described in this paper. The program structure is defined in terms of skill, content, and assessment areas. Specific subareas of content are listed and are to be used to guide lesson…

To secure information relative to the developmental aspects of their meaning system as measured by the semantic differential technique, 154 residential students from the New York State School for the Deaf at Rome, New York were divided into five groups according to age and academic grade level and were administered a semantic differential. It was…