The focus of this research is to determine how soon and to what extent infant abilities are influenced by listening experience. Fourteen English-learning infants and fourteen Spanish-learning 6-8 month old infants participated in a first experiment; eight additional English and Spanish-learning infants participated in a second experiment. Infants…

Children in kindergarten and grades 2, 4, and 7, and a group of adults were asked to choose, from a series of paired pictures, which of each pair represented the situation described in a statement that contained an ambiguous negation. In all five sentence types represented, there was a gradual progression toward adult performance, but…

A study is described in which the acquisition of "in,""on," and "under" was studied controlling for the non-linguistic strategies suggested by Clark's (1974) ordered rules, as well as controlling for stimuli bias. Clark's rules were: (1) If Y is a container, put X "in" it; and if Y is not a container, but…

This is an investigation of the phonological units used by preschool children. Twenty-four English-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;0 were given three experimental tasks which investigated their ability to segment initial consonant clusters into phoneme-length units: (1) in a segmentation task they gave the first sound of initial cluster words; (2)…

One hundred short test items representing the style and grammatical usage of ten preschool age children were selected from large samples of their narrative and directive speech. Three groups of adults predicted successive words in an effort to reconstruct the actual vocabularies and grammatical forms of the utterances. The predictors' correct…

The author proposes his theory on language learning: "...children learn pitch, stress, and juncture along with the more individual voice patterns which we might call tone, much earlier and more easily than they learn segmental phonemes and morphemes." This theory, which the author feels gains some confirmation from the learning processes of…

A distinction is drawn between pragmatic and semantic meaning and a supporting discussion is presented. The hypothesis is then stated, that there are cases where semantic meaning of an utterance is learned as an abstraction from pragmatic meaning. Data from two experiments on a group of 63 preschool children are presented which provide empirical…

This paper reviews the biological origins of the critical period hypothesis and the neurophysiological evidence which was initially supplied in support of a critical period for the acquisition of language. Noting the inconclusive nature of neurophysiological evidence, the author suggests that we look to the interplay of affective and cognitive…

This study examined variation in transcriber disagreement as a function of transcriber's linguistic background, the transcription task, and the nature of judgment involved. Three linguistics students trained in phonetic transcription listened to the same tapes of Midwestern kindergarteners pronouncing lists of common words. Transcription task…

Acoustic studies have shown that phonetic context can have substantial effects on the cues associated with a given speech sound. The present study investigates whether or not modifications in the acoustic correlates of initial stops and fricatives due to the following vowel can affect phonemic decision processes. In the first of two experiments,…

This is a bilingual book about language development of the young child. It is written for parents, with the objective of providing them with skills to help their children learn to talk. Emphasis is on maintaining communication between parent and child from infancy in a non-pressured, accepting, and positive environment. Developmental (normative)…

Numerous studies have been devoted to determining the interrelationships of listening to other language arts. Most of these studies have been focused on the effects of listening on reading; most also assume that listening ability can be measured and that effective measurement instruments exist. Even though the listening component of the language…

The purpose of the study was to provide a rating scale for the evaluation of children's fiction writing; to determine whether teachers could use the scale with valid and reliable results; and to determine whether inter-rater agreement among teachers could be increased by training in the use of the scale. The study also investigated the question as…

Do children integrate pronoun sentences in memory as adults seem to do, i.e., processing anaphoric reference between two propositions into a form in which their common element is represented only once (jointly) for the two propositions? Data from two experiments involving third and fourth grade students revealed that a few very vivid sentences…

Children should be exposed to a rich linguistic environment, but language learning tasks cannot and should not be optimally ordered. (DD)