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…

This paper reviews Philip Lieberman's "Intonation, Perception, and Language," (Research Monograph No. 38) Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1967. The review is also scheduled to appear in the "Journal of Linguistics." (JD)

Two experiments are reported investigating young children's comprehension of linguistic reference to past and future times. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)

Describes the process of play as a basis for language arts learning by gifted children. (DD)

Makes an analogy between the formation of a Creole and the language acquisition process in a child. (AM)

Investigators determined that recent research, showing no sex differences as to the age at which children acquire language, actually may have employed techniques inferior to those used in earlier studies, which showed that girls were more advanced. (MP)

Children between the ages of 6 and 11 learn to understand and use the relative pronouns "qui" and "que." The closer the subordinate clause is to favorite word order, the easier it is for the child. (MLA)

Describes a study designed to explore the nature of early use of two forms of the perfect--the present perfect and the present perfect progressive--by children over three years old. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: verb form, semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the…

Describes a study that tried to answer the following: (1) Are the passives of all actional verbs equally easy to understand? (2) Are the passives of all experiential verbs in a child's vocabulary about equally hard to understand? (3) Does comprehension of passives differ from verb to verb in a category? (SED)

Describes a study which compares expressive language samples from normal children and language impaired children across a range of grammatical and lexical dimensions to determine if it is possible to characterize language impairment using such dimensions. Identifies two variables which were reasonably successful in discriminating the two groups.…

Explores the early use of "behind" and "in front of" with large reference objects among 33 children. The patterns for the use of these locatives suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning. (SED)