This study examined patterns and developments in the communicative strategies of 3-year-old children over the course of their first year in a small, rural playgroup. It also: identified factors in the dynamics of children's playgroup experiences that correlated with the developments observed, investigated mothers' and playgroup staffs' perceptions…

Rejects the assumptions which underlie the audiolingual method and offers two alternative propositions: (1) successful use of language requires the acquisition of communicative as well as linguistic competence and (2) first and second language learning are analogous processes. (Author/FB)

This paper attempts to sum up, in non-technical terms, the essential differences between the acquisition of a first and a second language. It represents a conviction that a large number of the key concepts of TESOL can be drawn out of this type of comparison. The opening paper presented to the Pre-Convention Study Groups at the TESOL Convention,…

The construction and validation of the Early Language Milestone Scale for children at risk for developmental disability are described. It is concluded that delayed achievement of early language milestones strongly suggests the presence of a significant underlying developmental disability. Journal Availability: See EC 152 486. (Author/SEW)

Investigates the inconsistencies of personal pronoun production both in production and between production and comprehension in a pronoun-reversing child. (EKN)

Contrasts the syntactic view of forward and backward deletion of base structure elements with the idea that pragmatic factors of situational redundancy and perceptual grouping account for conjunction reduction in children. (EKN)

Based on an interview study of 138 kindergarten children, the data for the most part did not support Bernstein's ideas. Speech style indicators did not cluster into elaborated and restricted variants. Neither social control strategies nor school achievement scores were differentially related to elaborated and restricted variants. (PD)

Presents case studies of two first-grade children, examining their writing as a linguistic and social process that involves the child in an exploration of both oral and written language within the social context of the classroom. (HTH)

Parents are urged to provide a superior education for their preschool children by encouraging the development of the first language in the home and by teaching the young child to read in at least one of his languages before going to school. (PMJ)

Presents two analyses of deviant phonological systems. The one based on production evidence alone accounts for (1) differences in surface behavior of a set of phonetic segments with three possible phoneme sources, and (2) obstruent clusters across morpheme boundaries. The "substitution analysis" identifies the child's underlying representations…

The Ss were 63 first graders with reading and school readiness problems. It was found that Ss who received psycholinguistic training did not show significantly more psycholinguistic improvement than did Ss trained using traditional methods. (Author/DLS)

This study examined the development of causal expressions in children's discourse from two to three years of age. Linguistic, contextual, and pragmatic influences on language development were the major factors considered. (CM)

This study analyzes two versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" as told by a bilingual three-year-old girl in English. (CFM)

This study assessed the relative merits of adult-like syntactic and limited scope formula accounts of children's early determiner use to evaluate the claim that children can be said to be operating with a syntactic determiner category early in development. The study focuses specifically on Valian's (1986) criteria for attributing the syntactic…