Each of the three chapters in this dissertation is a separate consideration of one aspect of language acquisition by Tenejapa Tzeltal children. Chapter I places the specification of input sources and contexts in a matrix of the ethnographic description of the childhood portion of the life cycle in Tenejapa. Beliefs and practices that have a direct…

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

The purpose of this study was to describe the function-form relationships in a child's developing language by establishing a methodology for examining the child's early propositions and the predications which express them, identifying the points in the syntactic hierarchy at which different "meanings" are encoded, and investigating the…

The effectiveness of the CIRCUS language instruments for determining language comprehension and performance in the 4- and 5-year-old child is discussed. In these instruments, the use of content words is primarily studied through the use of single-word measures, such as a picture vocabulary test and an auditory discrimination test, whereas the use…

The basic objective of this research was to determine whether educators were justified in lumping togetner all Negro speech as "Negro Dialect" or whether there were wide variations within the inner city Negro community which educators should take into account when preparing reading materials. Thirty first-grade Negro children were…

The present research focused upon responses of three- and four-year old children to communicative demands posed in four common kinds of question situations. There were also manipulations of the object about which the question was asked, to test dependence of young children upon the presence of such objects. Children's responses were scored for two…

This unannotated bibliography deals primarily with questions concerning a child's acquisition of language and lists references dating from 1250-1967, reporting research from America, Western and Eastern Europe, and, to a lesser extent, from Japan. The main section of the book is an alphabetical listing of works on the subject of child language…

Four major areas of research into verbal development are discussed: (1) the relationships between behaviors hypothesized to be associated with one of the four major language skills, (2) the sequencing or ordering of behaviors within a skill, (3) the relationships between behaviors associated with different skills, and (4) the relationships between…

Using second grade children, this study was designed to investigate the differences (or lack of differences) among the Interview, the Picture Stimulus Interview, and the Free Play Situation techniques in the categories of productivity, thought groups, compound structures, complex structures, and words per thought group as a means of gaining a…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether by structuring and sequencing the same monosyllabic CVC, CVVC, and CVCe English words in two different patterns (EI and EII), administered with the same controlled procedures, boys and girls in grade one would be facilitated in detecting, identifying, and discriminating among single vowels and…

The 17-month (1967-1968) study summarized in this report concerned experimental analysis of the verbal behavior of disadvantaged preschool children (an interracial group of 28, ranging in age from 30 months to 42 months). Research was conducted in the verbal behavior laboratory at the University of Rochester and in a remodeled private home in a…

This study investigated semantic aspects of children's language as it is related to emotional expression. Children's ratings of vocabulary items categorized as expressing happy, sad, loving, angry, confident, and scared feelings were examined in three different ways: in isolation, in verbal contexts, and accompanying pictures of emotional…

The relationships between a child's perceptual space and the acquisition of language are discussed in light of the work of Clark, Fillmore, and Chafe. Early language is analyzed as a semantic structure where linguistic ties are established between semantic features and inherent and relational perceptual features. Of these, it is the relational…

Functional and linguistic aspects of the speech of Dutch-speaking mothers from three social classes to their two-year-old children were studied to test the hypothesis that simplified speech is crucial to language acquisition. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)