This book concerns a neglected aspect of the education of bilingual children, namely, their potential desire and ability to learn to read before age 5. The basis of the study is considered in the chapter on children as early learners, which provides accounts of children being taught to read from the age of 6 months to 4 years. The next part of the…

Since general principles of first language acquisition and environmental input have been clarified by research of the last decade, more differentiated questions are explored in the present study. The main goal is the investigation of similarities and differences in the language teaching and learning processes involved in the verbal interactions…

Four normal 3 1/2-year-old preschool girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in a semi-naturalistic setting in order to determine the existence and nature of linguistic differences in their interactions with adults. Adult conversational partners who participated in the study were 28 college-educated females who spoke American…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children can segment words, and (2) whether they can profit from instruction in segmentation. In the first phase of the study, all subjects (N=68) received a 28 word test designed to assess children's performance on four different segmentation tasks. Since the children…

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

In a study extending and refining Carol Chomsky's research, 48 Arabic speaking children aged six, eight, and ten were tested for their comprehension of imperatives using the complement-requiring verbs Ask, Tell, and Promise. Clear support for children's overgeneralization of the minimal distance principle was found only with Promise constructions.…

The English and Spanish utterances of 19 bilingual preschool children were monitored as they conversed with experimenters. Characteristics of the children's language are reported for a bilingual prestage (exhibited by the youngest subject) and for four developmental stages in English and Spanish. These stages are characterized by approximately…

The use of gestures by four infants was recorded as they interacted with their mothers. Waving, extending objects, and headshaking generally achieved a threshold of at least 10 instances within one month of acquisition. Both waving and headshaking were often first used in imitative and game routines with the mother before they became…

Developmental differences in preschool children's abilities to communicate about basic and subordinate level semantic contrasts were examined in a referential communication situation. Twenty-four three, four, and five-year-old children communicated with children of the same age and adults about pictures' referents. Speakers talked about one…

This is a quarterly report of a project involving the analysis of the language of four Puerto Rican children living in the Boston area who are learning Spanish as a first language. The children, all male, ranged in age from 17 months to 37 months during the period of study. All had some contact with English. The data were transcriptions of…

Major findings are reported of a longitudinal, naturalistic study of grammatical morpheme development in an aphasic child from 5;5 to 6;1. The majority of the morphemes were not acquired in the same order nor at the same mean length of utterance (MLU) levels reported for normal children. As an alternative to the normal acquisition model, based on…

Two groups of preschoolers and one of young grade-schoolers were tested for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. Four types of sentences were presented: affirmative and negative versions of sentences with factive main predicates (which presuppose the truth of the proposition of the complement clause) and with…

THE AUTHOR FEELS THAT TO APPROACH CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATIONALLY IS TO USE A TECHNIQUE SUITED TO PROVIDING ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO A WELL-KNOWN LANGUAGE FOR TREATING AN UNKNOWN, OR AT BEST LITTLE KNOWN LANGUAGE. SHE MAKES THE FOLLOWING CRITICISMS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE--(1) NOTHING CAN BE DIRECTLY INFERRED WITH REGARD TO…

Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

Two studies concerning the language-stimulation value of pictures for children were conducted. The first study tested the validity of a formula that classifies pictures as having high, medium, or low potency, based on the amount of language they stimulate in viewers. (The formula takes into account factors such as the number of animals, people,…