This article focuses on three aspects of language instruction in early childhood education: a) educational and sociological events which prompt concern over language behavior, b) results of research of the last 10 years, and c) suggestions for curriculum and instruction. (HMD)

Examines factors that contributed to unexpectedly large gains in verbal competence among a diverse and representative sample of urban first graders. Concludes that exceptionally high growth in the first grade is associated prominently with the characteristics of teachers and the maturity/personality and academic self-image of the students.…

Phonological development in children is described in terms of four stages; (1) preverbal vocalization and perception (birth to 1;0); (2) phonology of the first 50 words (1;0 to 1;6); (3) phonology of simple morphemes (1;6 to 4;0); and (4) completion of the phonetic inventory (4;0 to 7;0). (CTM)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of…

Examined the communicative behavior of 40 maltreated and nonmaltreated 31-month-old toddlers and their mothers. Results revealed that maltreated toddlers followed a pattern of shorter mean length of utterance, less descriptive speech, and proportionally less relevant speech. (RJC)

Irregularities in oral fluency, or "disfluencies," are common in the speech habits of both children and adults. Disfluencies can take the form of hesitations, revisions, repetitions, or interjections. Most disfluenceies do not occur at random, but are directly linked to other factors such as verbal planning--the combination of decisions…

The relationship between oral reading ability and the use of structure (function) words was examined in a dissertation study which hypothesized that the use of structure words in verbal discourse would be greater in children who have no difficulty in oral reading than in children who experience difficulty. Structure words were identified as those…

Explains the relationship between understanding a temporal or causal event and the ability to articulate and comprehend sentences about the event. The subjects of the research were 60 children from an Italian elementary school, 20 each from the first, third, and fifth grades. (CFM)

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

This analysis of Brazilian baby talk (BT) includes data from two sources: elicitations of the use of BT from three mothers, all of whom have university degrees, and observations of adult-child interactions in the home. The data shows Ferguson's modified list of thirty lexical items that frequently have BT forms in various languages and the…

This training manual and companion videotapes comprise an educational program for professionals and paraprofessionals who work with young children with language disorders. The program is particularly helpful in serving children from linguistic minority backgrounds and their families. The program's strategies are also appropriate for teachers and…

This training manual and two companion videotapes comprise an educational program for professionals and paraprofessionals who work with young children with language disorders. The program is particularly helpful in serving children from linguistic minority backgrounds and their families. The program's strategies are also appropriate for teachers…