This issue of the "SLANT" Newsletter for researchers in second language acquisition is highlighted by a report of research on second language acquisition by immigrant workers in West Germany (including research in progress and a bibliography). Also included are reports from various language acquisition conferences; a listing of summer…

Recent literature on the acquisition of "more" and "less" is reviewed with special emphasis on some key issues. The overriding goal of studies in this area has been the discovery of the developmental sequence that the child follows in acquiring "more" and "less," and, more generally, all comparative structures. The earliest empirical studies on…

This paper discusses the role of attention to uncertainty in mediating the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. It is proposed that language from the very beginning is used to resolve uncertainty by selectively marking points of change, deviation from the familiar or choice from among alternatives. Several research findings are…

Based on an examination of research on the language acquisition of children, the articles in this book are organized into three interrelated sections. Section one, "Language and the Young Language Learner," focuses on what and how children learn as they begin to acquire their language. The topic of language differences is also explored. Articles…

Sixth-grade students were subjects in a study to determine whether they possessed a repertoire of situational language in which registers or speech styles were differentiated by language use. A methodology was developed to elicit and describe children's language in different social settings that require different situational uses of language. Four…

The categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most…

This Outline is designed for students of the English language who have progressed beyond the introductory stage and are confronted by a variety of often conflicting texts. It is an attempt to provide a "comprehensive account of the fundamental coherence to be found among the major theories of linguistics" and an "appraisal of the cultural lags…

Dialects have features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that distinguish them from other varieties of a language; they exist in all languages and occur when members of one group communicate more among themselves than they do with speakers of another group. Black English vernacular (BEV) is a fully formed linguistic system with its own…

Research studies have demonstrated that children tend to define nouns by describing first their function and later the object to which they refer. In a study devised to trace the development of noun definition in the language of grade school children and adults, 20 subjects from each of four grade levels (kindergarten and grades two, four, and…

A number of the historical and contemporary games of black children reflect an attitude of resistance and assertion on the part of the players. Older game songs, dating from the days of slavery, express a recreative anger against slave masters or a contempt for the theater image of the jolly plantation slave, Jim Crow. Post-Civil War songs and…

This study incorporated a correlational methodology into an experimental context to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. The subjects for this study were 120 fifth- and sixth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class areas of Ogden, Utah. According to the…

It is the contention here that the "prelinguistic" period is an important phase of the language acquisition process. Accordingly the research reported represents an attempt to begin mapping out the types of linguistically relevant information to which a young child attends. Specifically it is hypothesized that young children are…

Concomitant with a child's acquisition of phonological, syntactic, and semantic rules of an adult language is the need to learn pragmatic and contextual abilities for proper use of the language. As early language acquisition is closely allied with play, three children aged about 22 to 40 months were observed during play activities to determine…

Many researchers have assumed that adult bilinguals have separate systems for their two languages. Such an assumption raises interesting questions about how the two languages are acquired in the case of a child learning two languages simultaneously. This study attempts to determine whether the two languages are acquired separately right from the…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…