Teacher interventions in the spontaneous arguments of seven preschoolers 3 to 5 years of age were analyzed. Twenty hours of data were audiotaped over a 3-month period in a small, church-affiliated private school while children were involved in free play and classroom activities. Interactions that might be taken as arguments were first transcribed…

Metalinguistic skill is the ability to assume an objective attitude toward language. Metalinguistic awareness is less easily acquired and appears later developmentally than speaking and listening skills. What one needs to know to perceive and use language is not necessarily the same thing that one needs to know to reflect on and comment on…

Recent research in linguistic theory and language acquisition theory has progressed to the point where more detailed hypotheses can be made about the interaction of language learning and linguistic theory. These hypotheses can be used to make more precise predictions about prerequisite knowledge for learning a particular construction and the…

The frequencies and co-occurrence distributions of some of the prosodic features in the speech of children are discussed. The emphasis is on the determination of systems and structure of non-segmental lectal variability in the children's speech without primary reference to function. The primary data consisted of selected episodes of connected…

Intended for teachers, authors, and publishers of children's educational materials, this book presents a list of words used by elementary school children in their creative or uncontrolled writing. The list is based on the writing samples of approximately 3,000 children, grades one through six, that were collected during a one-year period.…

This paper integrates a recent conceptual shift in middle childhood language acquisition research--the study of metalinguistic development--with a Piagetian perspective on cognitive development to propose a theoretical framework from which to consider language development during this period. The paper first defines metalinguistics and then uses a…

A familiarization procedure was used in two experiments investigating word encoding in second and sixth graders. Previous studies using release from proactive inhibition had indicated that developmental changes on some encoding dimensions occur during this period. It is argued that the dependence of release from proactive inhibition on deliberate…

Data on English article usage, based on a new classification system ("a,""the," and null article), were obtained from 20 adults and 20 two- and three-year-old children. An oral sentence completion technique was used with the child subjects, and the same items in written form were used with the adults. The results for the older…

This paper suggests that one possibility for the lack of study emphasis and unity of understanding in the area of dual language development is that language study in general shows some serious gaps and reveals a need for viewing language development as a holistic endeavor. Noting the failures of Skinnerian theory, Chomskian theory, Soviet…

The references in this unannotated bibliography were compiled from material available in the library of the Institiuid Teangeolaiochta Eireann (Linguistics Institute of Ireland). Most of the references were published during the seventies. They include books, journals, and microfiche. Arrangement is by subject, with an author index. Subjects…

Recent studies have documented the importance of a variety of contextualization cues such as intonation, voice quality, volume, and pitch in conversation. The appropriate use of and response to them presupposes that one has certain kinds of linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. There remains, however, the question of how children acquire this…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Forty-five children drawn equally from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were administered a nonverbal imitation task, a production task, a comprehension task, and a verbal imitation task. The results of the four tasks support the Temporal Complexity Hypothesis, which states that the components of temporality--order among events (O),…

Narrative observations were made of remedial interchanges occurring among school children (K-4) in open classrooms. Transcripts of interchanges were typed move by move and coded according to a hierarchical coding scheme (remedy, defiance, no response, relief, ending, and ambiguous). The interchanges of the kindergarteners and first graders were…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…