A defense of functionalism in linguistics, and more specifically the competition model of linguistic performance, examines six misconceptions about the functionalist approach. Functionalism is defined as the belief that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used for communicative functions. Functionalism…

A discussion of the role of linguistic theory in explaining language acquisition proposes that theory draws too narrow a picture of language to adequately account for the developmental phenomena of acquisition. While recognizing the importance of descriptive linguistic research, a new approach cautions against embracing description to the…

The inferential use of linguistic and extralinguistic information in structuring conversations was studied in 90 three- and five-year-old children. Pictures portraying an actor-action-object relation, e.g., a child picking a flower, were used to guide conversational sequences. Both active pictures (which emphasized an action relating actor and…

Thirty-six three and four year olds were given six language-related judgment tasks to identify different features of their metalinguistic awareness. Half of the items in each task were correct, half incorrect. Children exhibited metalinguistic awareness by a criterion of 90% or better correct answers on a task. The easiest task was based on…

The lexical development of four infants was recorded by their parents in diaries. In a selective imitation situation, individualized for each child, the responses of the children were compared with semantic predictions made on the basis of one of 14 hypothesized rules, and with the semantic alternatives available from the child's lexicon. It was…

Children aged 2, 6, and 9 years old were presented with four sets of differing objects and were asked to tell the experimenter which object out of each set they liked best. It was discovered that, as children grow older, pointing becomes rarer and linguistic descriptions become more appropriate. In two further experiments, the distance between…

This paper reviews Philip Lieberman's "Intonation, Perception, and Language," (Research Monograph No. 38) Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1967. The review is also scheduled to appear in the "Journal of Linguistics." (JD)

Two experiments are reported investigating young children's comprehension of linguistic reference to past and future times. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)

Describes a study which compares expressive language samples from normal children and language impaired children across a range of grammatical and lexical dimensions to determine if it is possible to characterize language impairment using such dimensions. Identifies two variables which were reasonably successful in discriminating the two groups.…

Explores the early use of "behind" and "in front of" with large reference objects among 33 children. The patterns for the use of these locatives suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning. (SED)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

This experiment investigated whether three- and four-year-old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose from several toys a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. (Author)

Transcripts of 11 young children's speech to adults were found to include hints and question directives. (FL)

Reanalyzes what the literature has taken to be children's productions of Gen subjects and argues that Gen subjects do not exist in child English. Suggests that what look like Gen subjects appear only in specific discourse contexts: contexts of contrastive focus or contexts of emphatic focus. (Author/VWL)