The discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. (Author/BW)

A study examined primary-grade children's ability to construct felicitous, or audience-accommodating, character introductions in their stories. The study was intended to (1) describe the linguistic variation children employed in character introductions; (2) identify cognitive factors other than egocentrism contributing to infelicitous…

Production data from a longitudinal study of seven children in their first attempts to produce words containing fricatives are presented to illustrate how children use four distinct strategies to approach this relatively difficult class of sounds. The strategies are: (1) favorite sounds--an approach used by a subject who seemed to enjoy playing…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

Early child phonology was studied using phonetically transcribed samples that six parents provided of their children's vocalizations, beginning when the children were about 11 months old and continuing to four years of age. The primary study objective was to obtain a sufficient amount of longitudinal data from several children to support a…

Observations of a 12-year-old boy provide an in-depth look at the writing of a successful adolescent writer, as it developed over a 2-year period. The subject was interviewed once a week in his home. In addition to the information obtained in interviews, his texts were analyzed for formal features. Three factors emerged as particularly…

This article hypothesizes that language repetition of young children (in the sense used by Kobashigawa and Snow) does not help language acquisition. The evidence comes from the results of a prior study in which no indication was found that mothers who repeat themselves a great deal have children who acquire language more quickly. However,…

The acquisition of the consonant system by a child acquiring Mexican-Spanish as her native language is described. During the earliest stages (from 1;7 to 2;1 years of age), the data showed several phenomena that could best be accounted for by assuming a central role for the word as the basic unit being acquired. The evidence for the centrality of…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…

Used observations and home visits to examine sex differences in language ability of 54 disadvantaged children at risk for poor language outcomes. Found that language difficulties increased over time, boys were at a constant disadvantage to girls in language development, and sex difference in language ability appeared even when families had similar…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…