This paper examines the referential strategies used by Japanese children and adults in two story telling tasks focusing upon the following discourse contexts: (1) first mentions of story characters, (2) references in subject position to the same character, and (3) references to another character. The subjects, 60 children and 10 adults, were…

Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Analyzes dialogs between mothers and their deaf or hearing children, while controlling for child age and linguistic ability. Results showed that the conversational interaction in mother-child dyads with deaf children was more restricted than that with hearing children. This seemed to be related to the linguistic ability of the deaf children. (SED)

The speech of two mothers to their infants between three and eighteen months was analyzed. Simplicity of speech was about the same at all ages, not showing abrupt change as children began to talk. It is suggested that mothers used a conversational model and changes reflect children's growing conversational ability. (CHK)

The spontaneous speech of a Mohawk-speaking boy was recorded from age 2;10 to 4;1. Analysis of this speech indicated that certain verbal prefixes are acquired earlier than suffixes. The pronominal prefix of nouns, on the other hand, enters late. Yet, before the appearance of any nominal affix, the child already uses a pronominal possessive as a…

The speech children spontaneously quote was examined in 2 studies involving personal narratives from 96 children aged 4 to 9 and speech in 25 children aged 1 to 5. Findings showed that frequency of reported speech increased with age and direct quotation was more common than indirect or summarized quotations at all ages. (57 references) (Author/LB)

A paper by Keenan and Klein (1975) provided evidence for the hypothesis that conversationality is present in children as young as 2 and 1/2 years of age. Results of the study indicated that before the emergence of more adult-like coherency operations, the children passed through a period in which such operations were foreshadowed by vocal play.…

Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

This book is designed to provide practical advice to parents and educators on the language acquisition process. Citing numerous case studies and anecdotal examples, it explains how children learn to talk and acquire language. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to language acquisition, explaining the components, forms, and structure of language.…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

This paper reviews studies on classroom talk and on mother-child interaction; it compares the latter with classroom talk and speculates on what language in the classroom could be. The discussion of language in the classroom revolves around: (1) the speech situation, that is, a situation organized in terms of some nonverbal activity; (2) the speech…

Research was conducted to examine the language acquisition of a Mexican-American child who has been brought up in a linguistic environment where code-switching between Spanish and English is the dominant style of speaking. In addition, the relation of code- switching to the acquisition of bilingualism is analyzed. The speech of the subject, a…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…