A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

Discusses the influence a first language can have on the acquisition of a second language. Includes some tentative proposals on the interaction of prior first-language knowledge and the creative construction process. (EKN)

A study is presented which investigated ways Spanish speaking preschool children learn to identify letters of the alphabet, the types of errors made in identifying letters, and whether there is a developmental learning sequence in alphabet learning for Spanish speakers. The question of the influence of socioeconomic level on performance was also…

This paper reports the results of a preliminary study dealing with the ways in which children between ages 6 and 7 organize spoken language. In particular, aspects of the temporal and segmental structure of polysyllabic English words containing the syllable C/jul/, as in the word "pediculous," are dealt with. This study is based on the assumption…

Children's self-monitoring of language production, as it is reflected in spontaneous speech repair, was studied. Recordings of the speech of three children aged two to three were analyzed for spontaneous phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic repairs. After tabulation, repairs were identified as "for the listener"…

A review of the literature on child language reveals little research on overgeneralization in the speech of the bilingual child. Questions arise regarding (1) the existence of interlingual overgeneralizations, and (2) the possibility that monolingual deviations and bilingual code switching might be forms of overgeneralization. Because a model for…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…