The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

This paper attempts to discredit the theory held by many educational psychologists and found most prominently in works by Bereiter and Engelmann, that lower class children are verbally deprived. The author reports on an experiment conducted by the staff of the Southwest Educational Laboratory among lower socioeconomic class children in Watts and…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

This study was conducted to discover how Nonstandard Negro English speaking kindergarten children form verb phrases and what they mean by the various forms. It was limited to the main verb in each sentence; passive forms and imbedded sentences were excluded. Only verb phrases from four types of sentences were analyzed: declarative, negative,…

The spontaneous speech of a six-year-old bilingual child was analyzed for this study. The child has lived in the United States and English is her primary language but her parents speak only French in the home and she has spent several months in France during three visits there. The data used in this study were collected in the child's home by her…

This study of child language acquisition concerns various structural and paralinguistic features of language and examines their role in the total language acquisition process. The informants were three children (two boys and one girl) aged five years, two months; three years, four months; and one year, nine months. Their speech was recorded over a…

The various chapters in the text provide details of factual situations and teaching practices in the school environment. The authors convey their conviction that the field of experimental pedagogy must remain autonomous while utilizing the findings of psychology and that all hypotheses derived from psychology must be verified through actual…

The present monograph is second in a series of reports on research work edited by Basil Bernstein of the University of London. The research, carried out by the Sociological Research Unit of the University of London Institute of Education, is concerned with the inter-relationship between culture, social organization and orientations towards certain…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary-school students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Independent variables were grade level, sex, reading level, community…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Conclusions of the study, reported in Part 2, were (1) pronunciations more…

Children's pronunciations of vowel clusters in synthetic words were analyzed in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. Subjects were 436 elementary students of both high and low reading levels from a suburban, an urban, and a rural community. Discussion of the problem and procedures of the study are found in Part 1,…

These papers were presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association in San Francisco, December 27-30, 1971. "Perspectives on Research in Speech and Cognitive Processes" was presented to a panel session on "Speech Communication Research of the '70s: Six Priority Areas," sponsored by the Research Board of SCA. It reviews…

In order to calibrate a vocabulary base which might be utilized in preparing materials for reading instruction at the elementary level, the 1000 most frequently used words in the preschooler's vocabulary provided the experimental data for several studies: (1) a series of free-recall experiments which yielded a scaling of common words according to…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

Limitations of the traditional epistemological orientation toward an "objective paradigm" are discussed, and an alternative "subjective paradigm" is proposed which holds that knowledge is synthesized by the knower, pursuant to his or her own motives. Implications of this view are drawn for the study of language, including…