Researchers from several disciplines have contributed to the realization that context or social situation varies in regard to a child's language acquisition. Children acquire both linguistic competence, the unconscious understanding of grammatical rules, and communicative competence, the understanding that language is used differently in different…

Discusses research on language development and the conditions that facilitate and inhibit language learning; discusses the basal reader approach to language development and proposes spontaneous talk as an alternative format for teacher/student interaction and language development. (HOD)

The forms and functions of nonverbal gestures accompanying verbal directives in the free play of three children were examined. Results showed that gestures supplement verbal communication and increase in complexity with age, supporting the viewpoint that language develops as a social and cognitive skill. (PMJ)

The ability of children between the ages of two years and four years, eight months, to produce locative pre- or postpositions was investigated in English, Italian, Serbocroatian, and Turkish to discover universals of conceptual and communicative development. (Author/AM)

Reports on an experiment describing the lexical development of a hearing child with a deaf mother and hearing father. Data confirm previous findings that (1) sign emerges before spoken word, (2) acquisition stages are similar in ASL and spoken English, and (3) the child initially develops one lexical system. (Author/AM)

Examines the innate faculties that underlie linguistic competence, especially syntactic competence, and proposes a theory of these faculties which accounts for the complexities of language and the evolution of human language. (AM)

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)

Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)

Reports on an investigation into the gestural repertoire of a deaf child raised in an oral environment. (AM)

This study documents the instances of code-switching and interference in the speech of a bilingual child living in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

Surface structure morphology in child second language acquisition is investigated with emphasis on mastery of correct forms and consequent implications for teachers and researchers. Communication strategies used by the second language learner are discussed. (RM)

Examines age differences in social interaction. Subjects range in age from five to 20. Results indicate female groups develop towards adult interpersonal behavior styles earlier than male groups. (Author)

The consensus of opinion seems to be that the processes of mother tongue acquisition are essentially analogous to those of second language (SL) acquisition. These processes, however, seem to work best in childhood years. A theory of adult SL learning should try to incorporate interlanguage. (CFM)

This study tested a theory of null subject pronoun variation, based on a model of discourse connectedness, on the oral and written Spanish narratives of northern California Mexican-descent pre-adolescents. Results indicate the children with greatest depth of ties to the United States are less likely to use overt pronouns than children born in…

Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…