Fifteen English-speaking and fifteen French-speaking preschool children were each videotaped during two play sessions, one with a native and one with a non-native peer. Length of verbal utterances toward the non-native listener was significantly lower than toward the native listener, supporting the notion that native speakers adapt the amount of…

The sources used, the procedures followed, and the results obtained in updating the kindergarten through grade six communication skills lexicon are covered in this report. The final list of 322 new terms included in the lexicon are appended. (Author)

An exploratory study investigated the communicative behaviors that differentiate talkative from reticent children. Four three-year-old girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in naturalistic interactions with six to eight previously unfamiliar adults. All four children had demonstrated age-appropriate knowledge of linguistic…

An 18-month study of the development of communicative competence in three Kaluli children from Papua, New Guinea, shows that Kaluli children use pragmatically appropriate word order before they correctly indicate "agent" by casemarking. In Kaluli, pragmatic concerns determine word order. The noun which the speaker intends to focus on is…

The following essays on children's spoken language are included in this volume: "Play with Language and Speech" by Catherin Garvey, "'You Fruithead': A Sociolinguistic Approach to Children's Dispute Settlement" by Donald Brenneis and Laura Lein, "From Verbal Play to Talk Story: The Role of Routines in Speech Events among…

Early language development was investigated in an observational study of three white 2-year-old infants of working class families in the inner city. In each family's living room, one hour videotapes were made of each infant's behavior at 3-week intervals over a period of 8 months. With the collaboration of family members, transcripts were made of…

Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…

This speech, presented at the 1977 meeting of the World Organization of Preschool Education (OMEP), proposes that the preschool linguistic environment determines language facility, which affects later school and work success. The normal course of communicative ability is traced. It is proposed that although most children, in and out of preschool,…

The booklet discusses and reports on a study of elicited imitation as a vehicle for assessing the language-functioning level of echolalic autistic children. An historical overview is presented of the diagnosis of early infantile autism. The question of whether or not early infantile autism is a distinct syndrome is addressed. The theoretical and…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

This report reviews experimental techniques that have been used to assess sentence comprehension by preschool children and describes a new technique, word monitoring, which permits an assessment of the momentary demands made upon sentence-processing mechanisms as a child listens to a sentence. (The time it takes the child to push a button in…

This investigation explored the conversational practices and conversational rule-conformity of children aged four, six, and eight. Procedures included observation of the conversational behavior of children in classroom interaction among peers and a controlled laboratory investigation of the conversations of 18 children, of varying age levels, who…