This handbook for teachers and parents discusses approaches for helping elementary and secondary school students understand and write poetry. Chapter 1 discusses various elements of expression such as words, thought, movement, and language. Chapter 2 discusses early poem-making and includes discussions of children's acceptance of language, steps…

This investigation studied the development of certain predicates called factives, such as "sad,""happy,""know," and "true," by studying the semantic effects of negation on the complements of both factive and non-factive predicates. The subjects were 60 children, divided into three age groups of ten boys and…

Two experiments were designed to assess children's ability to understand recursive structures of thinking which include thinking about contiguous people, thinking about action between people, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. In Experiment I, 32 second, fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were tested on eight tasks…

Designed to introduce the reader to the main works in normal (nondeviant) child phonology available in English, this annotated bibliography includes 2 general readers on child language and 27 books and articles with primary emphasis on phonology. The annotations, intended to be primarily descriptive, summarize: the design of each study; its…

Children's language acquisition is viewed by developmental psycholinguists as a process of change in the organization of language processing operations. Normal children seem to acquire their native language by this process, rather than by eliminating specific mistakes. Preschool language develops in stages, and knowledge of where syntactic change…

The purpose of this paper is to define the framework within which empirical investigations of probabilistic grammars can take place and to sketch how this attack can be made. The full presentation of empirical results will be left to other papers. In the detailed empirical work, the author has depended on the collaboration of E. Gammon and A.…

The author calls attention to a basic split between perception and cognition that psychologists or linguists tend to make either explicitly or implicitly. There is some psychological evidence to substantiate, at least for higher developmental levels, the functional importance of this split. The chief problems for psycholinguistics which arise out…

This report, the third of a series of reports dealing with convergent communication among children, compares children's performance on certain communication tasks with that of adults. (Convergent communication is defined as communication in which two persons cooperatively exchange information in order to reach an explicitly stated goal and where,…

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to determine universals of grammatical development in children. On the basis of language acquisition data, a limited number of findings are presented in the form of suggested developmental universals. These universals are grouped according to the psychological variables which may determine them, in the…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

This report considers the early stages of grammatical development in the child. It summarizes some cross-linguistic similarities in acquisition of several different types of languages: English (both white and black, lower and middle class), German, Russian, Finnish, Samoan, and Luo. With this small but diverse collection of languages and cultures…

Each of the three chapters in this dissertation is a separate consideration of one aspect of language acquisition by Tenejapa Tzeltal children. Chapter I places the specification of input sources and contexts in a matrix of the ethnographic description of the childhood portion of the life cycle in Tenejapa. Beliefs and practices that have a direct…

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…