THE AUTHOR FEELS THAT TO APPROACH CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATIONALLY IS TO USE A TECHNIQUE SUITED TO PROVIDING ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO A WELL-KNOWN LANGUAGE FOR TREATING AN UNKNOWN, OR AT BEST LITTLE KNOWN LANGUAGE. SHE MAKES THE FOLLOWING CRITICISMS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE--(1) NOTHING CAN BE DIRECTLY INFERRED WITH REGARD TO…

Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

Two studies concerning the language-stimulation value of pictures for children were conducted. The first study tested the validity of a formula that classifies pictures as having high, medium, or low potency, based on the amount of language they stimulate in viewers. (The formula takes into account factors such as the number of animals, people,…

This handbook for teachers and parents discusses approaches for helping elementary and secondary school students understand and write poetry. Chapter 1 discusses various elements of expression such as words, thought, movement, and language. Chapter 2 discusses early poem-making and includes discussions of children's acceptance of language, steps…

This investigation studied the development of certain predicates called factives, such as "sad,""happy,""know," and "true," by studying the semantic effects of negation on the complements of both factive and non-factive predicates. The subjects were 60 children, divided into three age groups of ten boys and…

Two experiments were designed to assess children's ability to understand recursive structures of thinking which include thinking about contiguous people, thinking about action between people, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. In Experiment I, 32 second, fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were tested on eight tasks…

Designed to introduce the reader to the main works in normal (nondeviant) child phonology available in English, this annotated bibliography includes 2 general readers on child language and 27 books and articles with primary emphasis on phonology. The annotations, intended to be primarily descriptive, summarize: the design of each study; its…

Children's language acquisition is viewed by developmental psycholinguists as a process of change in the organization of language processing operations. Normal children seem to acquire their native language by this process, rather than by eliminating specific mistakes. Preschool language develops in stages, and knowledge of where syntactic change…

The purpose of this paper is to define the framework within which empirical investigations of probabilistic grammars can take place and to sketch how this attack can be made. The full presentation of empirical results will be left to other papers. In the detailed empirical work, the author has depended on the collaboration of E. Gammon and A.…

The author calls attention to a basic split between perception and cognition that psychologists or linguists tend to make either explicitly or implicitly. There is some psychological evidence to substantiate, at least for higher developmental levels, the functional importance of this split. The chief problems for psycholinguistics which arise out…

This report, the third of a series of reports dealing with convergent communication among children, compares children's performance on certain communication tasks with that of adults. (Convergent communication is defined as communication in which two persons cooperatively exchange information in order to reach an explicitly stated goal and where,…

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to determine universals of grammatical development in children. On the basis of language acquisition data, a limited number of findings are presented in the form of suggested developmental universals. These universals are grouped according to the psychological variables which may determine them, in the…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

This report considers the early stages of grammatical development in the child. It summarizes some cross-linguistic similarities in acquisition of several different types of languages: English (both white and black, lower and middle class), German, Russian, Finnish, Samoan, and Luo. With this small but diverse collection of languages and cultures…