A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words…

This study investigated patterns of acquisition of English and Japanese by a toddler, aged 16-23 months, living in Japan. The child's mother and father are British and Japanese, respectively. The focus of the study was on early grammatical morpheme and transformational rule acquisition as demonstrated in the child's utterances. The study is…

This paper describes the linguistic development of two hearing sons of deaf parents. Both were exposed to an early language environment different from that of the average hearing child. At the start of the study, the boys were aged 3 years, 9 months, and 1 year, 8 months, respectively. When first observed, the older child performed well below age…

The question is addressed whether a child would develop a communication system if a conventional linguistic model is absent. Six congenitally deaf children, who were not exposed to Sign Language, were observed and videotaped at play in their homes at intervals of one to three months. The children ranged in age from 1 year, 5 months to 4 years, 1…

Most studies of language acquisition overlook the fact that a child learns language in the context of acquiring the social skill of conversing known as "turn-taking." The few studies of verbal turn-taking in children suggest that prosodic features (suprasegmentals) and turn-taking skills are integrated by the age of two years, nine months, and…

Bilingual and monolingual children were presented with experimental conditions where response mode and semantic information was varied. Forty children, 20 in each language-type group, responded in the present progressive and the past tenses to a series of colored drawings of simple activities. Half of the subjects responded to the task under…

In order to investigate the hypothesis that the conceptualization of sequence precedes that of simultaneity in child development, and to explore the use of elicited imitation in studying lexical acquisition, 32 subjects between 3 and 5 years of age were asked to verbally imitate a list of sentences. The constructions combined simple and reverse…

Teacher verbal mediation which might be associated with children's elaborated-restricted code use was described in 20 early childhood classrooms. Three teacher mediation patterns were identified. Data collected by RELAB, an instrument derived from Bernstein's coding categories, recorded 4,135 child statements, eight classroom contexts and eight…

This report is a detailed empirical examination of Suppes' ideas about the syntax and semantics of natural language, and an attempt at supporting the proposal that model-theoretic semantics of the type first proposed by Tarski is a useful tool for understanding the semantics of natural language. Child speech was selected as the best place to find…

A survey investigated how language management strategies used by bilingual families could create family communication problems. The study was inspired by experience with bilingual families in which rigid adherence to a language policy appeared to impede communication. Respondents were 83 members of a special interest group on bilingualism within a…

This study, replicating an earlier experimental study, examined language attitudes in New Mexican Hispanic bilinguals aged 10-20, drawing on a socio-educational model of attitude formation and focusing on the relationship between language attitudes and five other variables: age; gender; youth culture; language ability; and language and cultural…

Reports on an experiment in which adults were asked to identify the gender of prepubertal children by listening to a tape recording of their voices. Findings link social class and sex stereotypes. (AM)

Reports results from "Characters Online" a telecommunications in education project. Participating college students impersonated characters in children's books in electronic mail communications over the Internet with elementary school students reading the equivalent books. Both groups engaged frequently in informal conversation and rarely used…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

A child's literary experience may be "stretched" through extension activities such as reading aloud, discussion, writing, art, music, and drama. While any planned activity can be overused and work against the intent of furthering the child's literary growth, there are many valid ways of offering the child opportunities for savoring and reflecting…