This paper reports, analyzes, and interprets successive stages in the evolution of one two-year old boy's conception of death through a series of puns, metaphors, and misunderstandings about the nature of language, and of its relationship to the world to which it refers. (Author)

Describes the contents of three books which resulted from the University of London's Writing Across the Curriculum Project: "Understanding Children Writing,""Understanding Children Talking," and "Writing and Learning Across the Curriculum 11-16." (DD)

Discusses the developmental characteristics of the middle school years child. (DD)

Discusses experiences and activities to encourage language development in children younger than six. (BR)

Discusses children's language development in relation to reading and presents seven stages of conceptual reorganization among children that allow for progressively greater power of word discrimination. (JM)

A replication and extention of a previous study involved 61 children aged three to five, who were asked to carry out certain instructions. Results indicate that children do observe the distinction between definite and indefinite pronouns as it applies to quantity. (Author/RM)

Testing of eight-year-olds (N=159) with a battery of metalinguistic tasks, intelligence, and reading comprehension tests indicated that the relation among performance on metalinguistic tasks was strongest for those tasks relying on the same processing skill component. One of these components was most significant in determining the child's level of…

Analyzes research regarding children's acquisition and understanding of modal meaning. Results indicate that eight-year-olds have only a rudimentary system of modal meaning, and 12-year-olds' systems were not isomorphic with the adult system. (Author/CB)

Describes a study designed to discover how children approach the mass-count distinction as it applies to the use of "much" and "many." Results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of "much" and "many" with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a…

Analyzes early lexical and phonological development in three children from late babbling through the acquisition of 50 conventional words. Focuses on (1) the relationship between prelinguistic and linguistic vocalizations, (2) phonological development after the onset of speech, (3) patterns of lexical selection, (4) rate of lexical acquisition,…

The acquisition of "to" in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. Results support the conclusion that the verb system is a determining factor in the acquisition of linguistic structure. (SED)

Describes acoustic analysis of the speech of a child from 46 to 149 weeks in which overall word duration, pitch perturbation, and within-word phonetic segments were measured. The subject's overall word duration decreased considerably at a relatively late stage, supporting the claim that a child's neuromuscular control improves with maturation.…

Examines and discusses ways in which the presentation mode can affect children's talk when they are engaging in dramatic dialog. Gives special attention to those differences in language that occur across varying contexts of situation in drama. (HTH)

Describes a study that examined phonological features of a group of 10 Urdu speaking children (20 to 30 months) to determine if a general theory of language learning can be deduced on the basis of Jakobson's theory of language universals. Addresses the question of how far such a theory is applicable to Urdu speaking children acquiring their native…

Examines the possible developmental relationship between unimanual handedness and duplicated syllable babbling. Thirty infants were tested at weekly intervals between five months of age and eight weeks after the onset of duplicated syllable babbling. Results suggest developmental change in hemispheric specialization or at least asymmetrical…