To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

Discusses the importance of providing opportunities for children to learn through talk with an adult and contains excerpts from transcripts of parent-child and teacher-student conversations. (DF)

Assuming that an infant's first stage of verbal communication is melodic and the result of controlling the motion of the vocal cords, a question arises concerning the second stage in development. Is it the shaping of the oral cavity of the direction of the articulators? The author's observation of an infant through his first year of development…

This study examined the verbal interaction of teachers and pupils to determine if the quantity and quality of teacher verbalization had significant impact on the verbal test scores of pre-school Head Start Children. Teacher's verbal behavior was scored by a modification of the Caldwell Observer Rating Form. Children were tested using the Wechsler…