The two primary purposes of this book are to extend information about children's language learning and to look at existing notions of how children acquire language by considering what is meant by linguistic competence. The introductory chapter presents an account of two approaches to the study of language acquisition and outlines the author's viewpoint on conducting her investigations. The first approach was a study of her son at almost three years of age, while the second approach was a study of the language skills of young school children in order to describe the development of their speech, to consider how literacy affects their knowledge of language, and to explore their competence in various tasks requiring discrimination and judgment of linguistic data. Remaining chapters discuss early speech, the language of the preschool child, the language of school children, early states in literacy, linguistic competence, and form and function in children's speech. (TS)