A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…

The techniques of transformational grammar can be used effectively to identify and describe significant differences in the language competencies of children at several grade levels. The oral language responses of 150 elementary school children and 30 kindergartners (selected at random) to two silent, animated films of Aesop's "Fables" were…

It is possible to examine the development of English wh-questions in first and second language learners and to detect regularities in the order of emergence of certain linguistic structures. It is also possible to speculate whether the stages in language acquisition correspond to the transformational derivation in transformational grammar. The…

This project seeking to develop sound methodological research techniques for second-language is based on an initial pilot study which (1) identified and classifies the utterances of a child learning Spanish as a second language, and (2) determines whether there are any significant trends in the observed order of learning of kernels and transformed…

Television is of limited value to hearing-impaired children, who cannot benefit from the soundtrack. Traditional caption writing techniques, which involve editing of the audio track, have been based primarily on the captioner's empirical knowledge and intuition and aim the captions at a presumed average language and reading ability of the target…