Two experiments were conducted on the use and combination of three cues that differentiate active from passive verbs: a form of the auxiliary "be," the morphology of the passive participle of the verb, and the case-making preposition "by." In the first experiment, 59 children aged 2.9 to 5.10 years were asked to interpret…

This investigation addresses problems of defining verbal imitation, and suggests solutions by analyzing verbal interactions between two children and their mothers. Children were between 18 and 35 months old, with a mean length of utterance between 1.4 and 4.2 morphemes. Analyses focus upon the uses these children made of maternal models; 10…

This study investigates how children learn not to overgeneralize about grammatical forms and how to reformulate hypotheses about the grammar of their language even when receiving little or no explicit feedback. Two proposals were looked at: (1) input monitoring theory stating that certain overgeneralizations are eliminated from production because…

A study was conducted to identify characteristics of young children's written compositions that might be used to indicate growth patterns. Written compositions of 482 children of all ability levels, grades 1-3, were examined by two teams of teacher-researchers and placed on a continuum of sophistication. Four growth strands were identified: (1)…

This paper discusses the procedures employed in compiling and coding a basic set of vocabulary words and related linguistic data intended for use in elementary communication skills instruction. Ten thousand words were selected from eight studies of words used by children at various grade levels, one through six. Each word was assigned a grade…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

The essay in this issue of "Insights" develops the theses that children's language environment is the key to their language development, that the school setting and language arts program contribute little to language development, and that greater use of the best of children's books could significantly enhance children's language development. The…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

Reports on a diachronic study concerning the syntactic phenomena of coordination and subordination and their place in language acquisition. The organization and evolution of the coordination system of 4 children, ages 3-6 was studied. The need for investigation of adult speech for further understanding acquisition is stressed. (Text is in French.)…

Superior lexical awareness among readers is attributed to their experience with the printed correlates of spoken language. (Author)

This study is an attempt to combine the methods of sociolinguistic research with those of comparative education to study the language attitudes of teachers in two countries with the larger purposes of gaining insights into the teaching and learning of the mother tongue. (Author)

This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors…

The study reported here examined the use of color terms by 36 male and female students in kindergarten through fifth grade in a suburban New York City school. The children were asked to label colors using the fanciest color term they could. The only significant difference found was between younger females and older females, tentatively indicating…