The spontaneous use of two deictic forms in the speech of Samoan children was examined. Recordings were made of four Samoan children interacting with their families at monthly intervals over a ten-month period. The children were approximately 2 years old at the start of the study. The speech elements examined were the particles signifying…

The form and function of conditional structures in the speech of English speaking children between the ages of 2;6 and 8 years were investigated. Two types of conditionals were distinguished: reality conditionals and unreality conditionals. Data were obtained from audiotapes of the subjects under naturalistic conditions. A five-stage acquisition…

The purpose of this study was to describe the strategies mothers employ to elicit clarifying information from their children in a situation in which the children were reporting a past event. Forty 2-year-old children individually participated in a mock birthday party with the experimenter. Immediately afterwards, the mothers (20 of whom had…

The acquisition of verb meaning is discussed and compared with the acquisition of simple noun meaning. Evidence presented from three experiments with children and adults indicates that (1) verbal meanings are relatively slow to be acquired; (2) the acquisition of verb meaning involves the gradual addition of semantic components; and (3) verbs are…

In addition to componential aspects of verb meaning, children must also acquire a representation of each verb's combinatorial properties or propositional schema, i.e., the number of arguments with which it is obligatorily or optionally associated. The present study investigated developmental changes in children's awareness of the combinatorial…

The spontaneous speech of two Zulu girls was monitored for use of nominals. The data for one girl, 23 months, are reported in detail. Analysis of prefixed and prefixless nouns in isolated citation forms and in syntactic construction revealed that the child perceived the internal structure of nouns before the age of two, although the prefix often…

Children ranging in age from 1;1 to 1;3 were presented with 16 contrived lexical concepts, each consisting of a nonsense word (eight object words and eight action words) and four unfamiliar exemplars that served as the referents for that word. Overall, the children used 65% of the experimental words one or more times to refer to at least one of…

This paper examines Wittgenstein's conception of a language game. It is contended that there is, as yet, no linguistic science and that a great deal more deep philosophical imagining and "playing" is needed before we have enough knowledge to develop a real science of language. Similarly, superficial and over-literary British…

Examines spontaneous conversations between adults and children. Findings indicate that adults' altered mean length of utterance and type-token ratio were based on their age. Contrary to the researcher's expectations, the adults did not choose their words from the 10,000 most common word types in an age-dependent manner. (Author/CB)

Describes a study that analyzed and described humorous productions of deaf children and the reaction of other deaf children to those productions. One finding was that primarily verbal humor was appreciated more by older children with hearing parents; humor characterized by sign complexity, by children with deaf parents. (SED)

The author argues that a child is linguistically sophisticated by the time he starts school and that his language should be respected even if it does not fit the correct" pattern of the school. (MM)

Four words that cause the highest incidence of error in the English language are discussed. (CK)

One child's unique phonological rule is reported, which increased output variety and still yielded a mismatch with the adult form. It is argued that an addition to the strategies described by Menn is needed to account for the discovery of this rule and for later stages of phonological development. (Author)