Discusses and defends the innateness hypothesis - that a component of the human mind is a species-specific language learning mechanism--and discusses some implications of that hypothesis. (RM)

Suggests activities for teaching elementary students about types of word-meaning changes. (JH)

This research deals with how extraction rules are constrained in cases where their unconstrained application would give rise to semantic ambiguity. Of particular concern is the application of extraction rules to noun phrases (NP's) where word order is the only indication of the different syntactic functions of two adjacent NP's. Samples from…

Among the most important questions in psycholinguistics today are the following: By which processes does man organize and understand speech? Which are the smallest linguistic units and rules stored in the memory and used in the production and perception of speech? Are the same mechanisms at work in both cases? Discussed in this paper are…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a…

Examines the process of pidgin development within the context of the Government and Binding Theory proposed by Chomsky in 1981. Hypothesizes that the contact of various languages may produce a new experience which subsequently fixes the parameters of Universal Grammar, providing a pidgin core gammar. (SED)

Outlines what Universal Grammar (UG) attempts to explain in first language (L1) acquisition and considers what research UG suggests for the area of second language (L2) learning. Suggest that L2 learners are faced with similar problems as L1 learners and that UG might have a role to play in L2 as well. (SED)

Maintains that our understanding of language is enhanced by the study of pathology, rather than just the study of the normal. It is a sound complementary base to learn more about how language encodes more than labels. It encodes histories, personal myths, and affects and reflects aspects of deviance and delay in function. (SL)

Suggests that a structuralist separation of rules and lexicon from actual language seems to be a barrier to learning. Rather than viewing language as merely a system of rules and a dictionary, definable apart from context, it should be considered as a form of being in the world, and teaching methods should be compatible with such a view. (SL)

Presents theoretical syntactic formulas for translating sentences from one language to another. (KM)

This book traces the development of speech from a time when the spiritual roots of words were still experienced, down to the present day when words are in danger of being little else than 'bits' of information. The book illustrates the origins of everyday words and names and traces the use of words through history. It shows how certain sounds…

Research supported by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Ohio State University. (DD)

The right roof constraint'' is the assumption that rightward-movement rules are always upward-bounded; see J.R. Ross' dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax'' (MIT, 1967). (RS)