The short-range purposes of this study were (1) to determine parental attitudes about the appropriateness of two varieties of Black English for their children in three contexts (classroom, neighborhood, and home) and in four language arts areas (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), and (2) to show how parents' attitudes are related to their…

The speech of a 2-year-old monolingual Estonian child was studied over a period of six months. The child's initial and medial consonants and clusters were examined and charted to highlight her difficulties. Stops and nasals were easier than fricatives and sonorants; by 1 year 7 months the labials were essentially mastered; fricatives were more…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…

Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an…

This dissertation examines the principles of two current theories of first language acquisition and from them synthesizes a second language methodology. As a background to the problem of second language methodology, it is stated that the basing of second language methodologies on first language learning is currently being questioned and that the…

The purposes of this guide are to further the concept of language arts as the communication of ideas, to view goals in terms of specific aspects of child growth in language, to suggest ways of working with children in the achievement of goals, to provide guidelines for developing local curriculum materials, to aid in the selection and use of…

Concerned with educational problems associated with low socioeconomic status, this pilot study in linguistic ecology was designed to substitute hard data for speculation about the nature and frequency of verbal behavior in the world of the poor child. To avoid self-consciousness and any restrictions on movement of the subjects, a small…

This book, originally published in German in 1967, is intended to offer a detailed introductory review and discussion of psycholinguistic thought and research over the last two decades. Because it was originally directed to a German audience, the book places strong emphasis on behaviorist psychology, which has had little influence in Europe. The…

This volume contains the papers read at the Conference on Language and Language Behavior held at the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Language and Language Behavior in October 1966. Papers are ordered under the following topics: First Language Acquisition in Natural Setting, Controlled Acquisition of First Language Skills, Second…

A conceptual category approach to the study of the comprehension of natural language is presented as an alternative to previous approaches made solely in terms of information gain or specific linguistic variables. Elementary school children between the ages of 6 and 11 years were given a referent identification task to test their comprehension of…

Some of the assertions made by Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" are considered. In particular, the notion of a "competence" model in linguistics is criticized. Formal postulates for a conceptually-based linguistic theory are presented. (Author/JD)

For the linguist interested in typology and language universals, this paper suggests the usefulness of a taxonomy of copula and copula-like constructions in the world's languages and the elaboration of hypotheses of synchronic variation and diachronic change in this part of language. For the linguist interested in child language development, the…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

A linguistic analysis of five children's books, randomly selected from the "Modern Masters Books for Children" series, described the features of language found in books for beginning readers and demonstrated the value of structural analysis in reading research. Four linguistic measures were applied to each book: 1) the average number of words in a…

Previous studies have defined the earliest stage of child language to be the stage at which an uninitiated speaker of adult language can understand sentences spoken by the child. Upon the examination of the language of one child, aged 1 year and 7 months, it became evident that she could talk, even though it was equally evident that she didn't use…