The bibliography contains over 50 annotated citations of research on the nature of maternal speech and its effects on child language development. It is limited to studies focusing on verbal features of mothers' speech to normal one-to-four-year-olds learning English. The first section is devoted to literature describing characteristics specific to…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

This investigation explored the conversational practices and conversational rule-conformity of children aged four, six, and eight. Procedures included observation of the conversational behavior of children in classroom interaction among peers and a controlled laboratory investigation of the conversations of 18 children, of varying age levels, who…

This study investigated semantic aspects of children's language as it is related to emotional expression. Children's ratings of vocabulary items categorized as expressing happy, sad, loving, angry, confident, and scared feelings were examined in three different ways: in isolation, in verbal contexts, and accompanying pictures of emotional…

The purpose of this study was to analyze differences in children's written questions by means of the theoretical model of transformational-Generative grammar. Eight questions written by children in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 comprised the nucleus of this study. The eight questions were chosen from a larger group of questions and separated into…

A study examined the type of Wh question (those introduced by who, what, when, where, why, or how) and the phrase structure rules required for the verb phrase to determine how they relate to the acquisition and development of the Wh question transformation. Children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were given three tasks, each containing 36…

This study investigated the interrelationship of articulation and receptive and expressive language performance by 306 children in kindergarten and first and second grade in Fort Collins, Colorado, with regard to age, sex, and socioeconomic level. Fifty-one males and 51 females from the sample group were tested on three pairs of tests: the Arizona…

This report describes a study conducted to discover whether children with language delay would respond differently from normal children on two identically itemed tests of knowledge of adjectives and prepositions, one of which using objects as stimuli and the other using pictorial stimuli. It was hypothesized that the test using objects would be…

Forty children each from nursery school, first grade, and third grade participated in a study of the use of symbolic mediators in the control of overt behavior of children with internal and external locus of control. Each child participated in three different verbal control tasks: a push-button task, a pounding-board task, and a serial-recall…

This study investigated whether mothers' responses to their infants' gestures play a role in their infants' vocabulary development. Eight infants were observed interacting at home with their mothers on 2 occasions, when the infants were 10 to 12 months old, and 16 to 18 months old. Videotapes of the observations were transcribed and coded for…

The purpose of this study was to gather information on the acquisition of non-Indo-European languages. The field work was conducted in the village of Faleasao on the island of Ta'u in the Manu'a group of American Samoa from June, 1968 to June, 1969. The data collected consists primarily of tape recordings of naturally occurring and elicited speech…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

This dissertation examines the principles of two current theories of first language acquisition and from them synthesizes a second language methodology. As a background to the problem of second language methodology, it is stated that the basing of second language methodologies on first language learning is currently being questioned and that the…

This study was designed to investigate the effect of instruction in oral language (experience activities, synonym generation, and kernel sentence expansion) on certain aspects of first graders' oral language development and reading achievement. First graders in two elementary schools, randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, were…

This study focused on the following questions involved in the implementation of the language experience approach: (1) Which tutor will produce the most effective responses? (2) What is the reality of the existence of a Black English vernacular syntax? and (3) Is there evidence of black-white linguistic overlap? Natural, transcribed conversations…