Observations of children's responses to picture books in three first-to-fourth-grade classrooms over a two-year period helped to form a descriptive framework for children's responses to picture books. Field notes, transcripts, and other data revealed that when children talked about picture books, they used the lexicon of the expert. They seemed…

A case study was undertaken to examine the influence of one aspect of signed grammar, transparency of reference of some signs, on the acquisition of possessive pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL). The subject was a hearing child of deaf parents who was learning ASL and English. Data were collected in home visits betwen the ages of 1.1 and 3.2…

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

A preliminary experiment was conducted to explore the effects of illiteracy on hemispheric specialization. Groups of literate and illiterate Iranian children were tested on three dichotic tapes consisting of monosyllabic animal names, double-digit numbers, and nonverbal environmental sounds. All children were also tested for handedness and for…

Continued interest in second language acquisition as a reflection of first language acquisition may be due to increasing evidence of universals in child language acquisition. Some research has indicated that second language acquisition patterns do not match first language acquisition patterns. Rather than arguing that second language acquisition…

Three ten-step series of synthetic speech stimuli were constructed: /raem/ to laem/, /raem/ to /waem/, and /laem/ to /yaem/. Within each series, differences consisted of variations in onset frequency and slope of transition in the second or third formant. These stimuli were presented to 5- to 7-year-old children in identification…

Three groups (41 university reading faculty members, 34 classroom teachers, and 128 parents) provided data about their attitudes toward the relationship between language and reading, the reading process, and reading instruction. The results suggest that the three groups have different concepts of teaching and learning. For example, in the…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

A number of claims made by Bereiter and Engelmann, two of the strongest proponents of the verbal-deprivation hypothesis, are examined in light of data gathered during a longitudinal study of two children acquiring Black English Vernacular. The "giant-word syndrome" and its proposed concomitants of absence of developmental stages, deviant…

Imitation in the speech of the child serves at least three functions in the development of linguistic competence. Imitation provides auditory feedback for phonological and morpho-syntactic accuracy, produces a model for verification and/or clarification by speakers, and "makes time" for the processing and acquisition of information. Beyond these…

Failure in FL teaching is caused primarily by the theoretical view of language on which methodology has been based. A new theoretical base is required which is to be found in psycholinguistic research. The purpose of this paper is to inform the FL teacher of recent results of such research. (Author/KM)

To investigate cross-sectionally and longitudinally the development of children's early verbal behavior, 10 normal first-born Japanese infants from middle-class families were observed monthly and examined from when they were 6 to 24 months of age. Audio- and video-taped language data were obtained in a laboratory playroom setting during 15-minute…

To discover the truth about the extent of children's reading vocabularies, a project was undertaken at the Falk Laboratory School, University of Pittsburgh, to determine how many words first, second, and third grade children could recognize in print. A team of graduate students tabulated the words appearing in commonly used basal materials and in…

A study identified the homophones most commonly used in children's writing and showed how the relative use of specific homophones changes as writing skill develops. Homophones appearing in Rinsland's "A Basic Vocabulary of Elementary School Children," a vocabulary list compiled from a national sample of children's writing in grades 2…

Studies of the acquisition of word meaning and the semantic features involved have been mostly confined to noun categories and polar adjectives. Investigation of the semantic categories underlying verb forms has implications not only for theories of child language acquisition but also for theories of semantic structure in general. Experimental…