Analysis of mothers' pragmatic language use and children's language levels during free play sessions suggested that a mother-driven, direct influence model may be inappropriate for many mother speech-child language development relationships and points to the feasibility of child- and mother-driven explanatory models for indirect relationships.…

Re-analysis of data regarding children's acquisition of tense and aspect indicated that children learning Polish were influenced by aspect in acquiring verb tense in the same way as children were influenced in learning other languages. Children beginning to learn verb inflections found aspectual contour particularly compelling in leading them to…

Analysis of the discourse of eight- and nine-year-old children with emotional disturbances as compared with that of non-emotionally disturbed peers found significant differences between the groups. The analysis focused on mean length of utterances and discourse error patterns. (MSE)

Six autistic children, age 3-6, and 6 children with Down syndrome were followed over a period of 12-26 months. Autistic children followed the same general developmental path as the Down syndrome children in the acquisition of grammatical and lexical aspects of language. (Author/JDD)

Explores how children learn the range of aspect inflection to which a verb is amenable. Analyses focus on the children's mastery of Aktionsart specific intersentential patterns. Three conclusions are given based on the study's results. (21 references) (GLR)

Examination of parental responses to their young children's (N=3) inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors suggested that two of the children's parents followed ill-formed utterances with expansions and clarification questions. Such corrective responses dropped out of children's input as they continued to…

To improve oral communication skills of their students, teachers should provide opportunities for students to talk in class. Teachers are advised to: begin early, be sensitive to the individuality of students' speech patterns, and stress that there are different kinds of speech patterns for different situations. (JDD)

A study of two- to six-year-olds' spontaneous uses of "from" to mark oblique agents showed that, while the two-year-olds produced "from" for agents and "with" for instruments in imitation, older subjects shifted to "by" for agents and kept "from" to mark locative sources. (Author/CB)

Examination of the speech of eight mothers and eight fathers to their one- to two-year-olds (N=8) indicated that, while paternal speech was not more diverse than maternal speech, paternal speech did show greater use of rare vocabulary and lower use of common vocabulary. (Author/CB)

Explores the possibility of establishing predictability models for interference as well as ascertaining the degree of competence adult second language learners could achieve before being able to eliminate interference in production of the target language. (CB)

Reviews some features of the vernacular variety of Brazilian Portuguese that occur in the colloquial speech of educated persons, focusing on pronominal complements, reflexives, verb forms, verb tenses, and noun/modifier agreement. (CB)

Outlines phonological structure and processes of American Sign Language (ASL), covering: (1) sequential phenomena found in the production of individual signs; (2) the segmental phonetic transcription system; (3) paradigmatic and syntagmatic contrasts in ASL signs; (4) similarities between ASL and spoken language phonological processes; and (5)…

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)

Analysis of the communicative setting of televised electoral debates in Israel focused on the stylistic features of the political candidates' discourse. The analysis identified and described such rhetorical strategies as figurative expressions and intensifiers, irony and rhetorical questions, repetition and parallelism, and meta-discoursive…

Although Spanish mood has been taught through a framework of categorical rules, recently attempts have been made to clarify the exact nature of certain rules and to better understand the patterns of rule variability that exist outside the classroom. This article examines the intersection of mood with notions such as habituality, general truths,…