The paper examines how children quote their parents' utterances. In other words, it investigates linguistic recycling as an aspect of language learning and how the child-directed speech (CDS) of adults influences child speech (CS). This topic is examined especially in the light of research made in the crosslinguistic project on pre- and…

In this study, 5-year-olds and adults described scenes that differed according to whether (a) the subject or object of a transitive verb represented an accessible or inaccessible referent, consistent or inconsistent with patterns of preferred argument structure, and (b) a simple noun was sufficient to uniquely identify an inaccessible referent.…

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…

Although research on the language of the disadvantaged child is receiving much impetus, few extant studies have been helpful to the teacher. This article reexamines widely held misconceptions about disadvantaged child language in light of modern linguistic and psycholinguistic advances. (WY)

Reports on a study which explored the intonational differences between constant plus variable utterances and variable plus variable utterances, and which sought to use intonation to resolve the lexical additive vs syntactic representation of beginning productions. (AM)

Results are described of a study of vocalizations of two female infants, classified as cry, discomfort, and vegetative sounds, recorded between one and eight weeks of age. The implications for later speech development are discussed. (Author/RM)

Research with young Hebrew-speaking children revealed a development in linguistic control of the system of verb-pattern alternation from nonalternation to near mastery, with the concepts of causativity and distinctions in transitivity being lexicalized earlier than others. (Author)

Describes a model that allows children to control the complexity of the speech they hear within conversations on a moment-to-moment basis. Experimental and observational data clearly delineate the reciprocal nature of how speakers "fine-tune" their speech to listeners. The effects of child-directed speech on language development are discussed.…

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

In an experiment in which preschool children were asked questions such as "Which box is taller than it is fat?" the results were interpreted to mean that the linguistic strategy of attending to the first clause is more resistant to change than the preference for simply choosing the largest object. (Author/RM)

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…

The purpose of this study was to discover: (1) whether or not adults can discriminate between the babbling of babies learning different languages, and (2) the approximate age at which discrimination is possible. There were two tests involved in the experiment. The identification test consisted of 20 babbling samples, each of which was 15 seconds…

Looks at phonological development in lexical terms and extends the method of Ferguson and Farwell to consideration of syllables within words. The research is directed toward the question of whether children acqure a sound system by following "universal" orders of acquistion or by developing distinct strategies. (EJS)

Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)