A discussion of bilingualism in young children in the Soviet Union looks at the three main forms of early bilingualism (bilingual home environment, different languages spoken at home and in school, and second language instruction in school), notes the challenges they pose for development and maintenance of bilingual skills, and then describes a…

Papers from the proceedings are: "Cultural Universals in the Acquisition of Language;""The Acquisition of Locative Constructions in Cantonese Children"; "The Acquisition of VOT: Is It Language-Dependent?"; "Flexibility in Semantic Representations: Children's Ability To Switch among Different Interpretations of 'Big' and 'Little'"; "Multifunctional…

Concerned with what can be done to help produce more thoughtful, critical readers, this report first presents an historical overview of theories on the origin of language, referring to B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jean Piaget, among others. It then discusses biological reasons for the evolution of language and the impact of verbal language on…

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…

Prepared as part of a British project investigating children's language at home and at school, the study described in this paper centered on an examination of the spoken and written narrative texts produced by children to determine (1) the relationship between spoken and written texts; (2) the differences, if any, in the production processes used…

A study was conducted to compare the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents, as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detriot metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages 2 1/2 to 5…

This research study focuses on two interrelated aspects of the development of bilingualism, the development of awareness of two separate linguistic systems and the occurence of interference phenomena. The research was conducted in a small town in East Central Illinois. The sample for the study included all the Mexican-American children enrolled in…

A study was conducted to assess the ability of children to distinguish native from non-native English and to determine the age at which they reach the adult level of recognition ability. A brief passage containing the segmental phonemes of English was recorded by ten native and ten non-native speakers of Standard American English. The tape was…

The twelve papers in this volume, which concerns the interrelationship of language and sex, include: (1) "Difference and Dominance: An Overview of Language, Gender, and Society," by Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley; (2) "Women's Speech: Separate But Unequal?" by Cheris Kramer; (3) "The Making of a Nonsexist Dictionary," by Alma Graham; (4) "The…

The purpose of this paper is to review recent Soviet research on the child's development of Russian grammar, with detailed information on valuable methods for investigating this process. Cross-linguistic comparisons are made where applicable in view of their relevance for the study of universal aspects of language acquisition and linguistic…

A study of two public school kindergarten classes in New York City, heterogeneously grouped according to ethnic origin and social background, revealed that the maturity and fluency of the children's language varied according to the type of classroom activity in which they were engaged. From observational recordings of teacher-class interaction, it…

This project seeking to develop sound methodological research techniques for second-language is based on an initial pilot study which (1) identified and classifies the utterances of a child learning Spanish as a second language, and (2) determines whether there are any significant trends in the observed order of learning of kernels and transformed…

This study investigated the earliest manifestations of verb tense and agreement in English-speaking children, using longitudinal data on the language of four children aged 1:6 to 3:5 years, drawn from a child-language database. Analysis focused on one aspect of inflectional phrase (IP), the children's use of the verbs "be" and "do" forms to mark…

This study compared different strategies (questions, comments, reformulations, and repetitions) used by an adult in dialogue with 17 language impaired and 24 control preschool children. Two types of co-production (a tale and a personal account) were analyzed. The stability of the distribution of the various strategies in both situations is seen as…

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) the vocalization of /L/ in Philadelphia; (2) a second grade program to isolate and apply knowledge of vowel sounds in word identification; (3) phoneme and…