Knowledge of what constitutes development toward language maturity in school-age children should enable us to make substantial improvements in the language component of the curriculum. (Author)

To determine whether language behavior represents an early conditioned verbal response or whether it changes with age and experience was the purpose of this study which attempted to define unique isolates of language on the basis of actual language produced by young children. Tape recorded data were collected for 12 years from 211 children in…

It is proposed that in studying the development of children's speech, the findings in the data are heavily influenced by what is expected to be found on the basis of our theoretical preconceptions. This phenomenon is actually more widespread than has previously been acknowledged, and our expectations about how children learn language may have to…

Several studies have begun to investigate the claim that children can make most phonological discriminations when they begin to speak. This paper investigates how well children aged 2;3 to 2;11 can discriminate between pairs of minimally different real words, and it shows that the results are affected by how well the children know the words. It is…