A 1983 interview with Werner F. Leopold (1896-1984), a key figure in the study of bilingualism and child language, is presented. An introductory section gives some background to the interview. The discussion itself reviews Leopold's personal and professional background, work, and writing, and focuses largely on the linguistic development of…

A study investigated the development of children's metalinguistic understanding of the meanings of two non-ostensive words beyond the usual semantic acquisition period. The words, whose meanings cannot be associated with an object by pointing, were "pain" and "pretend". Two specific questions were addressed: What types of…

Although Mandarin is a discourse topic oriented language rather than a subject and sentence oriented one, Chinese children acquiring Mandarin attempt in their early speech to exactly mark the same referential grammatical relationships as subject, object, location, and instrument by using case or ergative markers. Only after marking a closed set of…

Children's acquisition of the mass-count distinction in English was investigated. In order to determine whether children approach the distinction as a morphosyntactic or a semantic distinction, 88 monolingual children aged 3-9 years were asked to judge the acceptability of 32 sentences containing "much" or "many" with 8 types of nominals. The…

Two theories of speech appear to parallel each other closely, though one (E. Nuttall) is concerned mainly with speech from a functional perspective, and the other (F. Williams and R. Naremore) presents a developmental hierarchy of language form and function. Nuttall suggests there are two main origins of speech: sounds of discomfort (cries,…

Two experiments investigated preschool children's use of the words "big" and "little" in three different ways (normative, perceptual, and functional) and in different contexts. The first experiment tested the sensitivity of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to relational standards by asking them to judge an object's size in relation to…

It is proposed that, in contrast to Chomsky's argument, it is possible to arrive at an empirically grounded definition of innate linguistic competence that guides the child in the construction of grammar, particularly when this process is viewed as developmental. This approach treats language acquisition as a process of change. It is suggested…

Theories of the acquisition of word meaning among children are reviewed and a case study of one child is reported. Three models of how the young child associates words with underlying concepts and conventional meanings are noted. While one model proposes that children initially overextend word meanings, the other two models propose that new words…

Verb nominalization in Navajo is a strategy by which children create category labels when the adult lexical item is not known; it allows for the creation of uniquely descriptive category labels. This study was based on a series of interviews with Navajo children aged four-and-a-half to approximately ten years, all native speakers of Navajo with…

Twelve pairs of three-year-olds and twelve pairs of five-year-olds were monitored in a play situation; their transcribed speech was examined for use of nominal reference, with attention to pronominalization and ellipsis. For the corpus of nominal references, there was a clear trend toward normal progression from specific indefinite to definite to…

This manual is designed to help parents facilitate their children's language development. It is divided into five sections based on different levels of language development that extend from children's early use of sounds to their production of four and five word sentences. Each section contains a brief general description of children's speech and…

A range of language use model is proposed as an alternative conceptual framework to a stage model of egocentric speech. The range of language use model is proposed to clarify the meaning of the term egocentric speech, to examine the validity of stage assumptions, and to explain the existence of contextual variation in the form of children's…

One English speaking child's phonological, semantic, and syntactical development from 15 to 21 months old is detailed in order to investigate the development of the mid vowel categories in English as reflected in spontaneous speech production. Prior research on this topic is summarized to reveal certain trends in the development of mid vowels.…

The speech of three girls aged 17 to 19 months was recorded in three at-home sessions. Patterns of single-word and multiple-word utterances were different for each of the three girls. This difference seems to support the notion that the most interaction-oriented child has, at least in terms of the word classes upon which she bases her…

Children with a mean age of 2;10 were presented with three tasks designed to evaluate their concept of front-back orientation. Two of the tasks were non-linguistic (a parade task and a canonical encounter task, involving nine toy objects). A third linguistic task assessed the child's knowledge of "front" and "back" by asking him/her to point to…