Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)

Describes a study that examined phonological features of a group of 10 Urdu speaking children (20 to 30 months) to determine if a general theory of language learning can be deduced on the basis of Jakobson's theory of language universals. Addresses the question of how far such a theory is applicable to Urdu speaking children acquiring their native…

Discusses the strategies that a child might employ during the one-word stage in constructing an early lexicon. An attempt is made to shed light on some strategies by analyzing the lexical and phonological development of two children who seem to take opposite approaches. (Author/JL)

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a…

This examination focuses on the idea that child language acquisition is constrained by the same principles that have been found to hold on syllable structure across languages. First, a recently-proposed constraint on syllable structure, the Sonority Cycle, is outlined, and the way that it accounts for syllabic structure across languages is…

This paper reports on the acquisition of the voicing contrast in Mexican-Spanish word-initial stops. In Study 1, three Spanish-speaking monolingual children were recorded every two weeks for seven months, beginning when the children were about 1;7. In Study 2, four monolingual children about 3;10 were recorded once or twice. Two analyses were…

Children's productions of words with stop-liquid clusters in the adult model are compared across six languages. Although the children learning these languages need not follow the same course of learning, processes operative on adult clusters are shown to be very similar. The children's productions all progressed through the same three major…

Examination of American Sign Language--produced by a deaf child acquiring the language from deaf parents, and videotaped at age 13, 15, 18, and 21 months--shows conformity to many of the phonological rules operative for all languages. (Author/CFM)

Compares and analyzes speech samples of Mayan and American mothers addressing their infant children. Results indicate that although higher pitch has been described as a universal feature of baby talk registers worldwide, the Mayan mothers do not utilize this feature. It is suggested that pitch-raising strategies may be sociolinguistically…

It is argued here that childhood phonological errors systematically simplify the child's inventory of phonetic elements and strings. (Author/KM)

The author discusses "the parallels between learning English as a foreign language and learning English as a native language and their relevance for the construction of appropriate teaching materials." Four postulates or language universals are presented about the order in which children learn the phonological features of their native language…

The experiment reported here attempted to investigate the nature of both intrinsic, unlearned temporal parameters as well as learned, language-specific durational properties in the speech of young children. Developmental aspects of several temporal parameters were investigated in the speech of ten 2 1/2 to 3-year-old and ten 4 to 4 1/2-year-old…