Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…

This speech, presented at the 1977 meeting of the World Organization of Preschool Education (OMEP), proposes that the preschool linguistic environment determines language facility, which affects later school and work success. The normal course of communicative ability is traced. It is proposed that although most children, in and out of preschool,…

The booklet discusses and reports on a study of elicited imitation as a vehicle for assessing the language-functioning level of echolalic autistic children. An historical overview is presented of the diagnosis of early infantile autism. The question of whether or not early infantile autism is a distinct syndrome is addressed. The theoretical and…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

This report reviews experimental techniques that have been used to assess sentence comprehension by preschool children and describes a new technique, word monitoring, which permits an assessment of the momentary demands made upon sentence-processing mechanisms as a child listens to a sentence. (The time it takes the child to push a button in…

This investigation explored the conversational practices and conversational rule-conformity of children aged four, six, and eight. Procedures included observation of the conversational behavior of children in classroom interaction among peers and a controlled laboratory investigation of the conversations of 18 children, of varying age levels, who…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

A set of data collected by researchers at the University of California at Riverside and presented to the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) is described in this document. The data consist of 14 hours of recorded interviews of 60 Mexican-American children in Riverside in grades 1-3. Comments are directed at the linguistic characteristics of the…

This paper examines the acquisition of English fricatives and is a preliminary report on one aspect of the Child Phonology Project at Stanford University. A characterization of English fricatives is presented, followed by a summary of current information on their acquisition. Three sample hypotheses from the Stanford project are discussed in…

A study made to examine the development in production of the English verbal auxiliary and copula (VAC) "to be" compared a group of children with language dysfunction and a group of normal children. Two purposes were to see whether developmental differences are qualitative or quantitative and to calculate the importance of the VAC in language…

This paper, presented as part of a military lecture series given by the Division of Continuing Education and Community Service Speakers' Bureau of the University of Hawaii to military personnel at Schofield Barracks and Fort Shafter, investigates the origins and present status of Black English. A discussion of early studies in the Gullah dialect…

This paper takes issue with the position that children's phoneme acquisition schedule is dictated primarily by auditory perceptual factors and suggests the alternative position that ease of production accounts for age of acquisition. It is felt that perceptual theory cannot adequately explain phonological development, e.g. three-year-olds produce…