Previously reported data (Brown, 1973) on language acquisition were analyzed to provide information about the correspondence of form, function, and meaning. The spontaneous speech records of two children were investigated. The observation period began when the boy was 25 months old and the girl was 18 months old and lasted 11 months. The…

Two markedness hypotheses in current language acquisition theory are examined. One view of markedness, the developmental hypothesis, states that the unmarked case is the child's initial hypothesis, i.e., the hypothesis that is set in advance of linguistic data. The developmental hypothesis further predicts that children will proceed in a fixed…

The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic…

The phenomena of null subjects in child grammars of English are examined in the context of Nina Moss Hyams' proposals about these structures within the framework of generative grammar. Some problems with these analyses are examined and an alternative analysis is proposed. It is noted that Hyams predicts that children learning a language requiring…

A study of children's language use in narratives given during play examined the longitudinal development of different linguistic systems of narrative structure: pronominal, clausal, and temporal. The narrative and dialogue in play with small toy figures was observed in eight children between the ages of 2 and 7. The findings suggest certain…

The focus assigned to sentential negatives is investigated in 7- and 10-year-olds and adults. Two cues are considered as pragmatic indicators of the sentence component(s) to which the negative operator is applied. One is the articles: it is proposed that an indefinite noun phrase is taken within the scope of a negative and a definite noun phrase…

This study examines the incidence and character of conditional statements ("if...then") in the spontaneous speech of young children. Twenty-four pairs of siblings, ranging in age from 2.1 years to 7.3 years, were observed and recorded while interacting in their homes for a period of 1 hour. Sixty-nine statements including "if"…

A study of children's egocentrism in their use of person and case examined whether 7-year-olds would tend to cast themselves as subjects in sentences using the verbs "give, show, say, tell, and lend," and what role they might assign the hearer. In 85 utterances, the children (N=17), with an average age of 7.8 years, showed the expected…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

A study examining the initial stages in the acquisition of the conditional system is reported. The objective was to discover how morphological productivity is related to the child's comprehension of the semantics of individual conditional types. Schachter's model of reality and unreality conditionals was used as a framework. Eight middle class,…

This study gathered information on the acquisition of affixes in Urdu by native children. The research was carried out in the city of Irbid, in northern Jordan, and in the capital city of Amman. Data consist of tape-recorded, naturally occurring and elicited speech of 13 children aged 2.4 to 9 years. The children were native speakers of Urdu,…

The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switching bilingual community. Co-occurrence restrictions…

The paper provides a brief discussion of research conducted in child language acquisition at the University of California at Davis in the winter and spring of 1977. The research was directed at children's comprehension of WHY questions. It was an attempt to define when and how children come to understand abstract concepts, such as WHY questions.…

A study examined the development of discourse cohesion in first language acquisition within a functional and cross-linguistic perspective. The analyses focused on how children introduce new referents in discourse across four languages: English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. The data base consists of narratives produced by children between…