Abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. It was concluded that increasing ability to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation…

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)

The field manual for a series of coordinated studies of the spontaneous acquisition of a second language by adult immigrant workers provides a theoretical and practical framework for the entire project and a source of information about it for other researchers. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the project's objectives and organization. Chapter 3 reviews…

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) instructional strategies in teaching synonyms, antonyms, classification, paraphrasing, and locating a main idea; (2) formal aspects of metaphor; (3) linguistic…