RESEARCH PROJECTS IN PROGRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR ARE OUTLINED IN THIS REPORT. EACH PROJECT DESCRIPTION INCLUDES A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE PURPOSES, SCOPE, AND DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH, AS WELL AS AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORK ACTUALLY UNDERWAY. THE NAMES OF THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS ARE ALSO…

This article discusses the popular belief that girls are more advanced in language development than boys. (Author/NCR)

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…

An analysis is made of the gradual learning process through which a child becomes bilingual from early infancy. (NCR)

For the two children studied and in the situations observed and recorded, important conditions for the emergence of language in the ontogeny of communication appear to be: (1) interaction with caretaking adults, (2) shared focal attention, and (3) specificity of reference. (Author)

Data are presented that reflect a particular strategy used by a boy from age 1;10 to 2;2 to manage certain polysyllabic words. Analysis shows that substitution was not involved, and an interpretation is made in terms of "underlying forms." Details of the strategy and its component sub-strategies are presented. (CHK)

This paper reports on a case study of a Cantonese-speaking child age 2 and considers the implication of tone acquisition for tone studies in general, and Cantonese tonology in particular. (NCR)

In testing kindergartners and first graders in their comprehension of the words "before" and "after," it was found that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. (Author/NCR)

Preschool children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers "very" and "sort of" was experimentally investigated in 64 children. (Author/NCR)

This experiment used two groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers to test for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. (NCR)

The research reported here was carried out to help establish the normal course of fricative acquisition as a basis for comparisons with abnormal development. Three questions concerning phonological processes were investigated as part of a larger study of fricative acquisition: (1) the phonological processes that underlie children's fricative…

This is a research report on the acquisition and development of language in children from 4 to 6 years as observed in the pre-elementary grades. The research was done by a number of teams scattered throughout France, and this book is a collection of the papers prepared as a result of their research. The report is divided into five sections. The…

This article concludes that language mixes do not constitute a major interference in the acquisition of bilingualism since children appear to be able to differentiate their two linguistic systems from an early age. (Author/NCR)

Literature on the sighted child suggests that blind children might be delayed in language acquisition and/or restricted in the semantic content of their utterances and in the communicative intentions they express. This study questions the use of guidelines appropriate for monitoring sighted children in the study of language development in blind…

This paper reports on two aspects of dyadic communication skills: verbal imitation, and response to questions and commands, as they relate to the development of semantic functions in three English-speaking children. The children, aged 16, 21 and 22 months, were unobtrusively videotaped during weekly free play sessions with their mothers. The…