The purpose of this research was to frame a hypothesis accounting for the observed behavior of particular children in a contact language area, in an attempt to understand their linguistic learning processes. The community involved was the township of Benque Viejo at the Guatemalan frontier, and the four informants, aged 10-13, spoke varying…

This volume deals with various aspects of the relationship between linguistic ability and general cognitive development. It presents original, up-to-date research for child psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, scholars, teachers, and students interested in this field and interprets the findings in the context of contemporary linguistic…

This conference report is centered on that phase of the Targeted Research and Development Program in Reading literature search dealing with language development as it relates to reading. Models of language acquisition, hypotheses derived from the models, and comparisons of synthesized models are discussed. Among them are behaviorist (Skinner),…

This curriculum guide is intended to introduce elementary school students to the reading and writing of poetry. Poems by recognized poets make up the bulk of the selections in the guide, but some poems by elementary school students are also included. The writers hope that the teacher will use the guide to encourage students to write their own…

Creative methods of communicating with young children are discussed. In order to communicate through talk, adults must realize that children have a "secret world" with their own language and reasoning and must respect it. Self awareness, patience, understanding, and consistency are necessary for adults to truly communicate with children through…

This paper argues that the best way to teach reading to children is through literature that reflects children's own language and what they consider relevant. Only those materials written in a language very similar to that which the child hears and uses himself, the author argues, will serve as the best teaching devices. Since the language of…

Registers--language varieties set apart from other varieties by the social circumstances of their use--are linguistic universals operating in all speech communities. Ghetto black children learn to control registers pertinent to the domain of family and neighborhood--most of which are spoken in their vernacular. Ghetto children are also expected to…

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…

Preprints of 24 papers presented at a conference, the subject of which was "The Learning of Two or More Languages or Dialects by Young Children, Especially between the Ages of Three and Eight, with Particular Attention to the Social Setting," comprise this report. The six sections of the conference were: Home and Preschool Language Learning;…

This study was designed to investigate the effect of instruction in oral language (experience activities, synonym generation, and kernel sentence expansion) on certain aspects of first graders' oral language development and reading achievement. First graders in two elementary schools, randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, were…

The two studies reported examine changes in the control over inflections of New Zealand children aged 5-10 years. The progress of White New Zealand children with English as their mother tongue is contrasted with the progress of urban Maori children and urban Samoan children in Auckland. (Author/DB)

In the context of a conversation in French between the author and her young English-speaking son, this discussion of methodology, the relative importance of grammar, progress in grasping the mechanisms of a language, and communication based on real needs raises questions for foreign language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Critically examines papers by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy. (AEW)

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…