A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

The relation of imaginative play to psycholinguistic development was investigated in a sample of disadvantaged preschool children. The children were assigned to high and low play groups based on their level of play organization. The high play group engaged in more task-relevant speech during play than did the low play group. (Author)

The cognitive development of lower-class English-speaking monolingual and English-Spanish speaking bilingual children in kindergarten, third, and sixth grades was compared by means of standard verbal and nonverbal measures. The verbal ability of bilingual children was assessed in both English and Spanish. Their scores in both languages were low.…

The nature of early games and how they might assist the infant in language acquisition were explored in a longitudinal study of two mother-infant dyads, using video-recordings of their free play. The analysis of appearance and disappearance games was particularly revealing. (EJS)

Describes the different stages through which children learn to speak, how they break the language down into its simplest parts, and then develop the rules they need to put the parts together. (GA)

The hypothesis explains the early lexical development of children and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. (Author/NCR)

This article clarifies the position taken in the Greenfield and Smith book (1976), including relation to speech act theory, and elucidates some general theoretical issues in early language development. (Author/NCR)

Discusses the characteristics of children's conversations, based on recording the conversations of three five-year-olds for a day, using radio microphones. (AA)

Reports on a child who evidently used a gestalt strategy (proceeding from the whole to the parts) in learning his first language. Further evidence for a gestalt strategy exists in the literature, albeit implicitly, and any theory of language or language acquisition should be able to account for it. (Author/KM)

The subject of this article is a Cantonese-speaking infant who arrived in the U.S. at 16 months. At 19 months, three striking anomalies marked her Cantonese speech. These anomalies are discussed; it is proposed that their origin may have been her new English-speaking environment. (CHK)

Kuczaj challenged the hypotheses that young children construct utterances by applying transformation rules to an abstract underlying structure. It is contended that Kuczaj's alternative hypotheses do not account for Hurford's data, and some of Kuczaj's new evidence actually supports the Transformational Hypothesis. (SW)

A preliminary study dealt with the ways in which children between six and seven years of age organize spoken language, specifically aspects of the temporal and segmental structure of polysyllabic English words containing the syllable C/jul/ (e.g., pediculous). (Author/SW)

Tests the hypothesis that the extent to which the durations of pauses (silences within the utterances of a single speaker) and switching pauses (silences between the utterances of 2 speakers) in the speech of children in conversation become similar (i.e., exhibit conversational congruence) is positively related to age. (BRT)