Using a discourse analytic approach from the work of Hoey (1991) and a dual processing model from Wray (2000), this paper compares the language produced by the same classes of children when they are engaged in role-play and when they are playing rule-based games. We find that role-play tends to be richer in "frozen" pair parts, where the responses…

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native…

Comments on some of the persistent problems that are encountered in the study of the transition from prespeech communication to early language. Topics are: 1) inference of communicative intent, 2) nature of early reference, 3) use of language in the regulation of joint action, and 4) the precursors of predication. (RC)

This bibliography is designed to introduce the reader to the main works in normal (nondeviant) child phonology available in English. It includes two general readers on child language and 27 books and articles with primary emphasis on phonology. (SW)

The performance of Icelandic-speaking children on the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender was investigated. Eighty children ranging in age from 4-8 years were tested. It was hypothesized that if children rely primarily on formal information for determing grammatical gender, they should perform equally well on both natural and syntactic…

A defense of functionalism in linguistics, and more specifically the competition model of linguistic performance, examines six misconceptions about the functionalist approach. Functionalism is defined as the belief that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used for communicative functions. Functionalism…

A discussion of the role of linguistic theory in explaining language acquisition proposes that theory draws too narrow a picture of language to adequately account for the developmental phenomena of acquisition. While recognizing the importance of descriptive linguistic research, a new approach cautions against embracing description to the…

The acquisition of two types of anaphora, reflexive and non-reflexive personal pronouns, was investigated. It was hypothesized that the two types of anaphora are acquired at different developmental stages. The three experiments involved Dutch children of age 6 and 7 and adults. Interpretations of sentences containing third person reflexive…

Concerns the language development of four children between the ages of 19 and 26 months, as they progressed from single-word utterances to a mean length of utterance of 2.5 morphemes. The observed developmental sequence is described and possible linguistic and cognitive explanations for it are discussed.

The inferential use of linguistic and extralinguistic information in structuring conversations was studied in 90 three- and five-year-old children. Pictures portraying an actor-action-object relation, e.g., a child picking a flower, were used to guide conversational sequences. Both active pictures (which emphasized an action relating actor and…

Thirty-six three and four year olds were given six language-related judgment tasks to identify different features of their metalinguistic awareness. Half of the items in each task were correct, half incorrect. Children exhibited metalinguistic awareness by a criterion of 90% or better correct answers on a task. The easiest task was based on…

The lexical development of four infants was recorded by their parents in diaries. In a selective imitation situation, individualized for each child, the responses of the children were compared with semantic predictions made on the basis of one of 14 hypothesized rules, and with the semantic alternatives available from the child's lexicon. It was…

Children aged 2, 6, and 9 years old were presented with four sets of differing objects and were asked to tell the experimenter which object out of each set they liked best. It was discovered that, as children grow older, pointing becomes rarer and linguistic descriptions become more appropriate. In two further experiments, the distance between…

Contrastive analysis is basic to all linguistics since only by this approach can a general theory of language (language universals) be constructed and only with at least implicit contrastive analysis can a particular language be fully characterized. Two kinds of contrastive analysis have been basic to diachronic linguistics: the comparison of…