The frequency with which a child's parents use a given linguistic form has been considered influential in language development. This hypothesis has been challenged, however, notably by Ervin (1964) and Brown (1973). The frequency hypothesis makes the assumptions that: (1) children are not selective in what they attend to, (2) they listen to most…

To investigate whether the viewing of printed words influences children's ability to produce plural forms, 120 kindergarten and first grade children were tested individually on 36 items consisting of real words and nonsense syllables that represented three categories: words that required pronouncing the "s" sound as the natural oral plural; words…

The influence of maternal language use patterns on the use patterns of the child was investigated in a black, low-income mother-child pair over a 20-month period, beginning at the child's 11th month of age. Video recordings were made of the pair's interaction in an unstructured playroom setting approximately every four weeks. Child multi-word…

A study was undertaken to see whether developmental patterns of language acquisition could be discovered in children beyond age five. Specifically, the study attempted to uncover a pattern in the development of the skill of stress interpretation, or the understanding of the effect of emphasis of a particular word on the deep structure of the…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

The three articles in this publication discuss the following topics: (1) a psycholinguistic perspective on beginning reading that focuses on the child's linguistic system, rather than on the information processing strategies he or she learns to use in reading, and identifies word recognition as the major hurdle faced by the beginner; (2) the issue…

This study investigated the agreement between previously published vocabulary lists recommended for use with children and lists derived from the speech of contemporary children in grades one, two, and three in Toronto. In the first part of the study, existing vocabulary lists were compared. In the second part, language samples were collected from…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

The Model 3 communication skills lexicon consists of three lists of words developed by the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) for use in communication skills instruction in K-6. This report documents the procedures followed in the specification and generation of the second component of the Model 3 communication skills lexicon, the general…

The established unit for reporting sociolinguistic data has been the sociologically determined group. Characteristically, only the mean rate of nonstandard usage for the group is reported for any linguistic feature. Such reporting obscures the possibility of linguistic heterogeneity within the group. Data from Los Angeles school children show that…

The Model communication skills lexicon, developed by the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) for use in communication skills instruction in kindergarten through sixth grade, consists of three word lists--an entry list, a general list, and a technical list. The Model 3 entry lexicon (Rhode, 1972)--based on a predominately white sample--was…

Participants in a seminar series in second language acquisition held at Harvard University discussed three papers by Dulay and Burt ("Goofing: An Indicator of Children's Second Language Learning Strategies,""Should We Teach Children Syntax?", "Natural Sequences in Child Second Language Acquisition"), and developed…

The study reports the results of the analysis of Comprehension-Production Test in the kindergarten of two bilingual schools (L-1 English/L-2 French, L-1 Spanish/L-2 English) in the San Francisco Bay area. The tests used covered 14 formal contrasts of English. Parallel tests for Spanish and French were developed by translating the English test.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and…

In the first part of the paper the idea of the cognitive network is developed. The network consists of concepts linked together by relationships which are themselves concepts. Concepts are learned according to simple rules, and the network grows as new concepts are learned. Part II considers the growth and structure of language. The growth of…