Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

Describes a study that examines the pragmatic language functions used by school-age children during a structured dialog consisting of a question-answer paradigm. Develops a 10-category taxonomy to classify subjects' responses and finds the taxonomy to be effective in two ways: (1) the number of categories is sufficient, and (2) the interscorer…

Investigates the nature of threats and their responses as collaborative units in children's discourse. Research indicates that girls prefer withhold-object or action and harm-threats while boys focus exclusively on harm-threats. Younger children produce more threats than older children, and threats occur more frequently in child-directed settings…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

Results confirm the value of play activities for language development, and illustrate the nature of linguistic interaction among groups of five-year-olds. (RL)