This report, the third in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, describes a study designed to determine how the massive exposure to television affects children's language development. A total of 153 children in grades K-6 were interviewed about the entertainment, informational, and advertising content of 24 programs…

This guide outlines in chart form the speech, hearing, and language behaviors which may be expected from children of ages 3 months through 5 years. It is designed to indicate progress and to alert parents and professional personnel to deviations from normal development. The information, in question-answer form, sketches behaviors for nine age…

A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

This paper attempts to demonstrate that children do not necessarily acquire fricatives before affricates. It begins with a summary and explanation of relevant parts of R. Jakobson's general theory of phonological acquisition. In part 2, an account of one child's acquisition of English affricates and fricatives is presented. In the period studied,…

When sound takes on meaning for the first time in the life of a child, a giant and prototypic step in the development of his symbolic capacities has taken place. This step is worthy of careful scientific scrutiny. This paper seeks first to describe the steps by which the author's child discovered the existence of meaning in sound, and second, to…

This book on the growth of word meaning in children focuses on the development of the appreciation of the relations that exist among twenty selected words as the individual matures from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The four preconceptions which determined the experimental tasks, the set of words used, and the methods of analysis…

The aim of this collection of Noam Chomsky's writings over the past 12 years is to present the main outlines of transformational theory, using as far as possible Chomsky's own words, but arranged in such a way that a non-specialist will have no difficulty in following the text. The topics covered include syntax, phonology, semantics, and language…

This study examined perceptual and articulatory confusions among the fricatives /f, v, s, z/ and voiced and unvoiced "th" in preschool children. (These phonemes are among the most difficult for children to articulate.) Seventeen children from 3.3-5.1 years of age were tested on syllables formed by taking all combinations of the six…

Theories of language acquisition which emphasize the role of imitation, reinforcement, inheritance, and the active involvement of the child himself in the language acquisition process are discussed in this paper. The three major theories are: (1) the behavioristic theory which asserts that children learn their language through imitation of…

The teaching of English in the United Kingdom has undergone change during the last decade and is presently in a state of flux. Current language concerns, mainly involving students 11-18 years old, may be viewed in three ways. Students' use of language should be encouraged in the classroom through expressive talk but with teacher guidance and…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

Language development in preschool children was studied using pairs of pictures with three types of verbal elaboration formed for each pair. After a training trial thirty children listened to one of three types of elaboration (simple sentence, compound or complex sentence, and paragraph). They were asked to name the corresponding response item.…

This paper documents the methodological study which was undertaken to discover the best way to obtain high quality tape-recorded samples of casual, spontaneous speech from children in kindergarten through Grade 3. All children interviewed were from schools in areas qualifying for compensatory education programs under Title I of the Elementary and…

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are…

The proposal that young children's communicative intentions stem from prelinguistic cognitive abilities is examined in detail. The most developed available formulation of this proposal, that provided by Brown (1973), is evaluated, and the evidence in support of it is found to be insufficient. Three crucial problems, which must be solved before an…