Examines the linguistic experimentation of children in three different age groups by means of their use of word games. (HTH)

Comprehension and strategy use of 18 autistic children was compared with that of normal 3- and 4-year olds. Subjects were asked to act out certain syntactic and semantic patterns in two experiments. Autistic children performed below the levels of the normal subjects, suggesting that autism is a semantic/cognitive deficit. (PJM)

Results of a study of 38 preschool children observed and videotaped during performance on a jigsaw-puzzle task indicate that puzzle solutions accompanied by a high rate of verbalizations were judged as more proficient, solved with a high rate of puzzle-solving moves, and completed in a shorter period of time. (Author/RH)

Provides evidence that in producing voiceless stops in terms of voice-onset-time values, children first overshoot adult values and then only gradually draw back toward adult values. (Author/RL)

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in three, four, five, and six year olds to examine bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The judgments of the six year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children.…

Presents examples to substantiate the observation that children experiment with and benefit from writing long before they receive formal instruction, and suggests ways for parents and teachers to avoid obstructing this natural and healthy tendency. (HTH)

The speech of 26 mothers to their infants at an early age was compared with their speech to them 2 years later. Results show that speech to infants was different from so-called "baby-talk," and that speech to them was shorter, more limited, and more repetitive than speech to language-learning children. (PJM)

Previous research has reported instances in which some two-year-olds failed to overextend in comprehension what they overextended in use. Fremgen and Fay found no instance of overextension in comprehension in separate experiments. From this Fremgen and Fay conclude children never overextend in comprehension. This conclusion is re-evaluated here.…

A research review of the relationship between children's oral language proficiency and the development of linguistic awareness and learning to read. (CM)

An experiment was designed to answer the following: (1) can children as young as 2 1/2 to 3 years of age employ contextual cues in order to distinguish request from offers? and (2) do children's discrimination skills for these illocutionary acts improve with age? A model of the comprehension of illocutionary force is proposed. (Author/AM)

Compares Lodge's (1979) examples of children's use of the past tense in pretend play with examples of the use of other moods and of modal auxiliaries. (AM)

Reports on an experiment which sought to compare child and adult speech in terms of (1) stop productions evidencing devoicing during consonant closure, and (2) consonant closure evidencing voicing in the case of devoiced stops. (Author/AM)

This article discusses the linguistic background of two Italian children who lived with their parents for an extended period of time in Holland and for a brief time in Puerto Rico and spent vacations in Italy where their relatives spoke the dialects of Veneto and Friuli. (CFM)

This article describes a plan to develop bilingualism carried out by the parents of a child of pre-school age who died of brain cancer at the age of five. The child learned German, the language of his father, and Spanish, the language of his mother, consecutively. (CFM)

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)