Two studies were performed to determine the process used by young children to figure out the meaning of a new word. It was hypothesized that the children would use one of two strategies: (1) ignore the word and wait for more information, or learn only what is unambiguous about it, or (2) make a reasonable but uncertain guess, quickly setting up…

The concern of this book is to examine written language and its relation to what is ordinarily understood by the term oral language, the process of its acquisition, and the place of written language in the process of mental development. The eight chapters (1) examine the relation of written language to oral language and trace the phonocentric…

A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Two investigations of preschool children's relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information to discriminate between speech acts revealed that younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, while older subjects' performance was adversely affected. (Author/CB)

Contains citations for journal articles, books, dissertations, and materials in the ERIC system on the subjects of writing, language, literature, and teacher education. (SRT)

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Describes a study which sought to determine the developmental stage at which children begin to differentiate specific and neutral contingent queries. The study manipulated the familiarity of the adult listener by having each of the 22 children interact both with the mother and with an unfamiliar adult experimenter. (SED)

Reports research which investigated the effects of microcomputer technology on the acquisition of writing and reading skills in 32 deaf children. The learning mechanism underlying the instructional system used is responsive, interactional and exploratory, reflective of the way most children acquire a first language. (SED)

Investigates the development of communicative competence during preschool age by analyzing certain types of communicative acts and sequences of communicative acts in adult-child and child-child communication. Assumes there are certain phases in which a child is especially prepared for the acquisition of certain types of communicative acts. (SED)

Reports on a study of the language acquisition of a group of Portuguese children who belonged to two socioeconomic backgrounds: upper middle class and lower class. Aims to show that verbal formulation, referential non-linguistic material pragmatic cues, and cognitive factors play decisive roles in language development. (SED)

Emphasizes the importance of psycholinguistic research in enabling us to discover phenomena which will later be seen to have representations in the brain. In addition, the different ways a second language is learned and used, as well as the differences in the actual language structures themselves, will participate in determining brain organization…

The study of speech errors, or "slips of the tongue," is a time-honored methodology which serves as a window to the representation and processing of language and has proven to be the most reliable source of data for building theories of speech production planning. However, until "Kids' Slips," there has never been a corpus of such errors from…

The distinction in meanings of the English word "educated" and Spanish "educado" is used to illustrate a theory of semantic memory for the bilingual that proposes two lexical stores, one for each language, in close cooperation with and connected by one semantic memory. The postulated relation between the lexicons and the semantic memory is…