Suggests that children should learn to read by creating their own spellings for familiar words. (NH)

Overview of current research on how children learn their native language before school. Implications to aid learning in school are discussed. (DR)

The second language learner, in acquiring grammatical rules, must draw hypotheses about language from exposure to examples and use these hypotheses for creating further utterances. Mistakes which force the formation of new hypotheses are a natural part of this process. A sample lesson taking these factors into consideration is presented. (FWB)

One aspect of the phonology of a four-year-old child with Down's syndrome was explored: a phonological constraint ordered his consonants from those produced at the front of the mouth to those produced at the back of the mouth. The value of an analysis that recognizes phonological strategies and larger than phoneme units is discussed. (Author/SEW)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

This experiment investigated whether three- and four-year-old children show systematic preferences for animate or inanimate nouns to function as actors and objects of simple active and passive voice sentences. The children had to choose from several toys a suitable referent for a nonsense word used in a sentence. (Author)

Transcripts of 11 young children's speech to adults were found to include hints and question directives. (FL)

Children exhibiting a referential orientation seem more likely to acquire new object names than nonreferentially oriented children. Also, children's selection of words may be influenced by the phonological structure of the words. (Author/RH)

Children (ages 5-8) were presented with a communication task under four different experimental conditions, to find contexts which would encourage their use of the indefinite article. Even older children failed to identify their referents consistently, although nearly all subjects used indefinite expressions intermittently when mentioning new…

Draws implications for the teaching and learning of writing from the language acquisition of children, based on the contention that human capacities for acquiring language do not change qualitatively as people mature. (DD)

Examined whether there was negative evidence in adult reformulations of erroneous child utterances, and if so, whether children made use of that evidence. Findings show that adults reformulate erroneous utterances often enough for learning to occur. Children can detect differences between their own utterance and the adult reformulation and make…

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating 3- and 4-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses. From the results, she argues that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of relative clauses before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This article evaluates this conclusion…

Presents a hybrid ACT-R model that shows U-shaped learning of the English past tense without direct feedback, changes in vocabulary, or unrealistically high rates of regular verbs. Illustrates that the model can learn the default rule, even if regular forms are infrequent. Shows that the model can explore the question of why there is a distinction…