Metalinguistic skill is the ability to assume an objective attitude toward language. Metalinguistic awareness is less easily acquired and appears later developmentally than speaking and listening skills. What one needs to know to perceive and use language is not necessarily the same thing that one needs to know to reflect on and comment on…

It is essential that language arts students in teacher education programs learn more than just facts about language, such as grammar, dialect, and so on. Future teachers must be taught how language, especially the child's language, affects the teacher, the child, and the child's achievement in school. These prospective teachers should learn what…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

The interaction between theoretical linguistics and language teaching has historically been problematic. This interaction is viewed here from the standpoint of educational linguistics, which is the intersection of linguistics and related language sciences with formal and informal education. The issue is the relevant educational problem that…

Because of the syntactic differences between Spanish and Quechua, Quechua-speaking children must make major word order adjustments to learn the Peruvian Spanish taught in school. This study investigates whether the order or time sequence in which these changes are adopted reflects any general constraint, or is in any way predicted by a theory of…

The linguistic interactions in the speech of bilingual children is systematically examined to determine their ability to differentiate between their two language systems. The speech samples of eighteen bilingual (Spanish-English) children aged two to six were examined for instances of deviation from the norms of the language of utterance due to…

This paper attempts to show the relationship between variable rules and more widely used psycholinguistic constructs such as amalgams and schemas, and to point out how variationists' methods can be useful in the study of language acquisition. The traditional rule, the rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs in English, is discussed as it…

The study of language acquisition requires that the analyst identify the learner's target and have available a grammatical description of the target. In the case of the Caribbean Creole environment, special caution is required in identifying the learner's target because substantial variation is intrinsic to the input and ambient language. Existing…

The paper examines interpretive aspects of English non-uniformity among fifth and sixth grade Native Americans at Laguna Elementary School, Laguna, New Mexico. Speaker assessments of instances of uninflected "be" are ordered to form an implicational scale. The variability in the students' assessment pattern is compared to previous inter-ethnic…

A three-year study of the linguistic and metalinguistic performance of forty Mexican-American children ranging in age from three to eleven years shows that it is useful to characterize the competence of the bilingual in terms of a unified system of rules, at least at one level of analysis. This paper explores some aspects of the grammatical…

A study of code-switching in a group of 35 Spanish-English bilingual third-graders is reported. The students' diary journal entries and writing assignments based on previous classwork are examined. Retelling of stories previously told by the teacher and the journal entries helped identify the kind of language used by students, the code-switching…

This research study explores how sex role identity is related to the learning of communication and socialization processes in a Taiwanese kindergarten. The study hypothesized that undifferentiated baby-style verbal and nonverbal communication patterns are superceded with styles that become increasingly gender-linked, and language is viewed as a…

The development of local norms using the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities was part of a larger study, the purpose of which was to identify the percentage of Arizona school children having a handicap. The first step in this part of the project, which involved screening for communication disorders, was the selection of tests to identify…

Discusses language in the context of human development and civilization, examining a limitless field of studies and observations including the absorbent mind, the acquisition of language and grammatical structure, the linguistic capacity for abstract thought, the power of language and world community, the role of language and human uniqueness, and…

The Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish (FUMS) at Uppsala University has one of the largest collections of spontaneous present-day spoken Swedish and has housed many sociolinguistic research projects since the 1960s. The four studies generating the most empirical data are on: The Urban Dialect of Eskilstuna; The Child's Linguistic…