Intended for elementary school language arts teachers, this paper outlines some recent work in the area of cognitive functioning and shows how this highlights the necessity for great care in fostering a child's language competence at two different stages: very early childhood and early to middle primary school. Following an introduction, the paper…

The study of the spontaneous generation of a pidgin by two children, five and six years old, to accommodate their communication needs when neither had fully acquired his native language, is described. The children were an African native of a Swahili-speaking family and an American child living in the African village. The new language created was a…

A classroom-oriented therapeutic program was devised for four pragmatically impaired preschoolers who showed little spontaneous language use within the classroom. Intervention strategies focused on facilitating interactions during free play and were based on four principles for practitioners: be child-oriented; engineer the environment; use…

This paper attempts to show the relationship between variable rules and more widely used psycholinguistic constructs such as amalgams and schemas, and to point out how variationists' methods can be useful in the study of language acquisition. The traditional rule, the rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs in English, is discussed as it…

This study used several measures to compare 40 toddlers with delays in expressive language and 40 children acquiring language normally. Findings indicated that children with small expressive vocabularies at 2 years of age are not different from their normally speaking peers in terms of hearing, history of ear infections, birth order, or pre- or…

Input language may have an effect on child development that goes far beyond language development alone. Language is the medium by which children acquire at least a portion of their sex role and social class or group characteristics, world view, and emotional and psychological well-being. Existing theories of psychological development ignore…

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being…

Prompted by the concern of parents and educators with both the process of a child's language acquisition and the amount of time spent watching television, a content analysis of children's television commercials was conducted to see if this form of mass media could be used to stimulate language skills in children. The 36 commercials were drawn from…

This document reviews a number of recent studies written in French that investigate the nature of communication between 2-year-old infants and others. The review includes three parts. The first part focuses on studies aiming to constitute a behavioral catalog of the child. Characteristically, these studies offer a posteriori interpretations of…

This study examines one aspect of sociolinguistics: social cues affecting the choice of language in the speech of children bilingual in Spanish and English. The study is based on data collected from the speech of two children, from birth to age nine in the first case and from birth to five in the second. Analysis focussed on the identification of…

Children's mastery of reading skills would be facilitated if reading programs capitalized on children's already-developed oral language competence. Barriers against "reading for meaning" exist when the cues used for predicting in oral language are not present in the written language which confronts children; yet anaylses of four reading…

This report of research discusses the role of popular television in developing children's verbal skills and in bringing together adolescents and adults. Implications for the home and classroom are described. Titles include "If You Believe in Television, Clap Your Hands," an introductory look at research concerning popular television in the…

Several recent reports on the untutored second language acquisition of English have suggested that the same developmental sequence holds for the acquisition of the interrogative structures irrespective of whether English is acquired as a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). These studies have been conducted within the Klima & Bellugi…

The papers in this volume were initially presented at a seminar on the development of reading comprehension, which explored basic research and the teaching of reading comprehenison. Researchers in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and experts in curriculum design in reading gave presentations and reacted to one another's ideas. Each…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…