A study of non-native children's acquisition of communicative competence examined the child's construction of rules of conversation in the second language. The linguistic devices that children use to link up their utterances with those of another speaker, i.e., cohesion-creating devices that create textual unity, were focused upon. Repetition, one…

Observation of child language development is just one way to study how language changes over time. Developmental psycholinguistics shares much common ground with historical linguistics and with studies of languages in contact and the evolution of pidgins and creoles. By studying the way language changes, this paper focuses on clarifying the…

This paper examines research findings about language development and their implications for classroom teaching. It first discusses early analyses of child grammar, which led to descriptions of the telegraphic nature of the speech of very young children and to the classification of child grammar into pivot and open classes. It then points out…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…

This is a report on an on-going research project sponsored jointly by the Speech and Hearing Clinic of the University of Oregon Medical School and Portland State University. The book contains a brief historical review of the study of speech in normal children in recent years. Then follows a structural description of the language used by each of 25…

In this paper, the structure and the use of language are postulated as socializing agents influencing sex-role learning in three major ways: (1) sex differences occur in language use and parallel sex-role stereotypes; (2) the language that is addressed to children is usually the language of socialization which instructs the child what to do,…

A study was undertaken to determine whether children in early periods of language development use stress with any regular patterns, and if so, on what the patterns are based. The subjects were five children aged 21-29 months, MLU between 1.3 and 2.4. Tape recordings were made during play sessions with each child. Two-word utterances that could be…

This annotated bibliography provides information concerning audiovisual aids for use in teaching and teacher training in language acquisition. A variety of areas is covered, including children's acquisition of morphology, phonology, and semantics, vocabulary and language development, the acquisition of specific items such as negatives and…

The fourteen papers are: "Developmental Psycholinguistics," by David McNeill; "Comments on 'Developmental Psycholinguistics'," by Dan I. Slobin; "How to Learn to Talk: Some Simple Ways," by Jerry A. Fodor; "The Acquisition of Russian as a Native Language, " by Dan I. Slobin; "Some Questions on the Child's Learning of Phonology," by Ruth H. Weir;…

Three stages of the developing second language of a 3;9-3;11 year-old English-speaking child in an Urdu speech milieu were examined and compared with findings that have been accumulated about the order and process of first language acquisition. The study showed that in the development of many syntactic and morphological features the child used…

This book reports the proceedings of the conference on the role of speech in language, the fifth conference in the "Communicating by Language" Series, sponsored by the Growth and Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The focus of the first group of papers is on the development of speech in man and…

This paper outlines the details of a series of lessons for teaching the passive voice to speakers of other languages. A specific plan entitled "From Repetition to Meaningful Use: A Suggested Progression" includes a series of yes/no questions and progresses both from teacher-directed conversation to student-student conversation and from the reality…

This report examines the question of whether grammatical rules are globally learned and applied. It also attempts to determine the underlying word order in English as well as the developmental sequence of the acquisition of Aux. A sentence-repetition test using positive statements, positive questions, and negative questions was administered to 30…

The objectives of the research reported here were (1) to develop and test the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) technique, a method for quantifying the increasing use of syntactic and morphological structures in the spontaneous speech of children between the ages of three and seven, (2) to establish age norms for syntactic and morphological…

This volume is a prepublication edition of four papers presented at a briefing held for representatives of government agencies, foundations and other organizations, November 12, 1970 at the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. "Linguistics as a Pilot Science," by Joseph H. Greenberg, examines the impact which…