A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)

A child acquiring a language must learn to correctly match the phenomena of the realworld which he perceives with the lexical items and the segregates and perhaps some of the grammatical categories of the language to be learned. He must correlatively learn the organization in meaning of and among these last named elements, that is, the internal…

Describes a study that examined phonological features of a group of 10 Urdu speaking children (20 to 30 months) to determine if a general theory of language learning can be deduced on the basis of Jakobson's theory of language universals. Addresses the question of how far such a theory is applicable to Urdu speaking children acquiring their native…

Reviewing the language instinct debate, this article identifies generativist views with the baby's proverbial bathwater. Suggests that instead of analyzing language into form-based units, it should be treated as an aspect of social life deriving from a capacity to contextualize experience. (Author/VWL)

This paper discusses empirical findings from the first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese suggesting that certain properties of the logical form of natural language are not learned from experience. These unlearnable properties appear to manifest themselves in the child's linguistic knowledge as soon as prerequisite conditions are met.…

Children should be exposed to a rich linguistic environment, but language learning tasks cannot and should not be optimally ordered. (DD)

The question of why language acquisition is not instantaneous is addressed in terms of two related issues: the logical and the developmental aspects of language acquisition. The role of linguistic theory and research in determining the interplay of these two aspects of grammatical development is examined. It is suggested that the…

This article discusses the now established" fact that one aspect of language development in native English speakers is the increasing ability to embed larger and larger numbers of sentence consituents and considers its implications for second language acquisition. (FB)

Discusses the strategies that a child might employ during the one-word stage in constructing an early lexicon. An attempt is made to shed light on some strategies by analyzing the lexical and phonological development of two children who seem to take opposite approaches. (Author/JL)

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a…

Maintains that our understanding of language is enhanced by the study of pathology, rather than just the study of the normal. It is a sound complementary base to learn more about how language encodes more than labels. It encodes histories, personal myths, and affects and reflects aspects of deviance and delay in function. (SL)

Argues that current attempts to show that forward directionality effects can also be induced in Japanese acquisition do not succeed in supporting the forward directionality preference of anaphora. (57 references) (Author/CB)

Three experiments were conducted to conceptualize how structural differences between English and Japanese affect the way in which young children acquire the verification system. Linguistic characteristics that may distinguish between English and Japanese verifications are described along with the possible responses to four types of statement: true…