The speech of each of eight children aged 15 to 24 months was monitored in an informal setting and analyzed for the imitation of nonsense words introduced by the experimenter. In a second session, objects were introduced as referents for the nonsense words. Results failed to support the two initial hypotheses, namely that children imitate in part…

This study focuses on meaning differentiation among different causative expressions. Semantic differences between lexical and periphrastic expressions are reviewed. A picture comprehension task was administered to 32 adults and 99 children between the ages of 32 and 70 months. The children were asked to select the picture that matched a sentence…

This report on research in progress explores criteria for lexical innovation in children. Children, like adults, make use of a principle of conventionality (each word has one or more conventional meanings) and one of contrast (the conventional meanings of every two words contrast). Like adults, children coin words to fill lexical gaps, and they do…

The focus of this research is to determine how soon and to what extent infant abilities are influenced by listening experience. Fourteen English-learning infants and fourteen Spanish-learning 6-8 month old infants participated in a first experiment; eight additional English and Spanish-learning infants participated in a second experiment. Infants…

Children in kindergarten and grades 2, 4, and 7, and a group of adults were asked to choose, from a series of paired pictures, which of each pair represented the situation described in a statement that contained an ambiguous negation. In all five sentence types represented, there was a gradual progression toward adult performance, but…

A study is described in which the acquisition of "in,""on," and "under" was studied controlling for the non-linguistic strategies suggested by Clark's (1974) ordered rules, as well as controlling for stimuli bias. Clark's rules were: (1) If Y is a container, put X "in" it; and if Y is not a container, but…

This is an investigation of the phonological units used by preschool children. Twenty-four English-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;0 were given three experimental tasks which investigated their ability to segment initial consonant clusters into phoneme-length units: (1) in a segmentation task they gave the first sound of initial cluster words; (2)…

One hundred short test items representing the style and grammatical usage of ten preschool age children were selected from large samples of their narrative and directive speech. Three groups of adults predicted successive words in an effort to reconstruct the actual vocabularies and grammatical forms of the utterances. The predictors' correct…

The author proposes his theory on language learning: "...children learn pitch, stress, and juncture along with the more individual voice patterns which we might call tone, much earlier and more easily than they learn segmental phonemes and morphemes." This theory, which the author feels gains some confirmation from the learning processes of…

A distinction is drawn between pragmatic and semantic meaning and a supporting discussion is presented. The hypothesis is then stated, that there are cases where semantic meaning of an utterance is learned as an abstraction from pragmatic meaning. Data from two experiments on a group of 63 preschool children are presented which provide empirical…

This paper reviews the biological origins of the critical period hypothesis and the neurophysiological evidence which was initially supplied in support of a critical period for the acquisition of language. Noting the inconclusive nature of neurophysiological evidence, the author suggests that we look to the interplay of affective and cognitive…

This study examined variation in transcriber disagreement as a function of transcriber's linguistic background, the transcription task, and the nature of judgment involved. Three linguistics students trained in phonetic transcription listened to the same tapes of Midwestern kindergarteners pronouncing lists of common words. Transcription task…

Acoustic studies have shown that phonetic context can have substantial effects on the cues associated with a given speech sound. The present study investigates whether or not modifications in the acoustic correlates of initial stops and fricatives due to the following vowel can affect phonemic decision processes. In the first of two experiments,…

This is a bilingual book about language development of the young child. It is written for parents, with the objective of providing them with skills to help their children learn to talk. Emphasis is on maintaining communication between parent and child from infancy in a non-pressured, accepting, and positive environment. Developmental (normative)…

Numerous studies have been devoted to determining the interrelationships of listening to other language arts. Most of these studies have been focused on the effects of listening on reading; most also assume that listening ability can be measured and that effective measurement instruments exist. Even though the listening component of the language…