An experimental study investigating the interaction of linguistic complexity and performance in child language acquisition tests the hypothesis that children learning a first language acquire relatively complex sentences somewhat later than less complex sentences. In one of three tests, the subjects, 44 children aged 3.6 to 6 years, were presented…

The influence of maternal use of verbs upon a child's developing rule system for verb usage was examined. Previously reported data (Brown, 1983) on mother-to-child speech were analyzed. Thirteen different contexts for verb use were identified. There was a close resemblance between the way the child and his mother distributed their uses of verbs.…

Three experiments investigated the processes by which 2-year-olds acquire the language to express category hierarchies. The first experiment studied how children use current linguistic knowledge to constrain the potential meanings of new words. This experiment compared interpretations of new words given to objects the children could already name…

Sentences produced by children and adults in telling stories are analyzed, with particular emphasis on developmental trends in sentence length, the degree of cohesion between clauses, and the internal coherence of sentence content. Subjects for the study were 10 adults and 60 Japanese children in six different age groups. Each subject was…

There are problems in interpreting the naming behavior of children. Children may misname a word because the word is absent from their vocabulary, because it is not yet firmly established, or because of a word retrieval or lexical assessing problem. Preliminary results are reported of an experimental technique designed to account for these…

The role of the abstract triconsonantal root in the acquisition of Moroccan Arabic was investigated. Evidence from recorded speech samples of 32 Moroccan children between the ages of 3 and 6 is used to demonstrate that the abstract root plays a central role in both the nominal and verbal acquisition of the lexicon of Semitic languages and that the…

This study analyzed the acquisition of the interactional competence in an environment where children used two or three languages every day. Two aspects were examined: the acquisition of culturemes such as thanking and greeting, and the comprehension of indirect requests. The bilingual children observed were eight Swedish-Estonian children, six…

A study of the awareness of verb transitivity in the spontaneous speech of two two-year-old native speakers of Quiche was accomplished by examining three factors: transitive terminations given to verbs, subject markers on the verbs, and syntax. The first was studied by counting the number of transitive verbs used with both transitive and…

The notion that children over age 5 have acquired a conjunction once they have used it appropriately once or a specified number of times is challenged with data from a study of the narrative discourse of school age children. In the study, 26 adults and 71 children aged 4 to 11 were asked to tell a story about three sets of story pictures. Analysis…

Learnability theory involves the construction of formal mathematical proofs whose goal is to demonstrate how the child can successfully induce a mature grammar. An empirically adequate learnability proof constitutes a detailed hypothesis concerning the boundary conditions within which acquisition proceeds and can provide a general framework for…

A study of the development of children's production of two kinds of narratives, script and episodic, had as subjects 60 children aged 3, 5, and 7, with 20 children in each age group. In the experiment, 10 children in each group were asked to produce script narratives ("What happens when you do X?") for 3 events and the other 10 were asked to…

A study suggesting semantic rather than syntactic early language acquisition by children. (CH)

This study attempted to place children's language in its wider setting and considered the meanings the child can express in connection with the orms in which he expresses them. (Author/RK)

James Britton's model of the uses of language is discussed as a way to focus and organize studies of response to literature. After the model has been explicated, specific studies are discussed in relation to a number of research areas: early forms of literary experience, the child's developing "sense of story," the child's awareness that…

An overview of bilingualism and language acquisition is followed by a description of a research study of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English in three children. (RM)