Third through ninth-grade students were asked to write an essay on the subject, "Why I like to read," to determine children's language in describing their purposes for reading, to gain some impressions of what functions and purposes might emerge, and to analyze whether particular functions appear at various developmental levels. (HOD)

Younger and older children were asked to label pictures of nonprototypic, container-like objects in an effort to test Nelson's theory regarding the primacy of the functional core in young children's meaning structures. Contrary to expectations, the older, intermediate age children were influenced more by functional context than were the younger,…

Results suggest that, among nursery and kindergarten children, metaphoric processes exist early in development, as exemplified by a high frequency of spontaneous metaphor in the free play of young children. The content and cognitive features of these metaphors are discussed and hypotheses are offered for the decline of metaphor use with age.…

Expressive language samples were obtained from 20 children in four location-stimulus combinations and from wireless radio telemetry. No significant differences existed between the locations of home and clinic, but significant differences were noted among samples elicited using pictures as opposed to open-ended questions as compared to telemetry…

Describes the longitudinal emergence of verb inflections as observed in the speech of four American English-speaking children emphasizing occurrence of inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and their conditional use. Discusses results in terms of sentence relations between verbs and other constituents and the semantics of verb…

The development of spoken language is considered from three related aspects: symbolic function, auditory-vocal function and communicative function. Attention is drawn to the implications for education of developmental delay in any of these areas. Some of the danger signals presented in the classroom are mentioned. (Author/KC)

Discusses how single-word usage reflects two stages in child language development. Early words express internal states and share none of the corresponding semantic features of these words in adult language. Later words approximate the use of adult language and share standard semantic features of adult indicative words. (JMF)

Questions the validity of some child language studies that measure cognitive ability by the degree of complexity of the linguistic expression. Claims that these studies ignore many facets of the children's sociocultural experience as well as the influence of situational factors on their choice of linguistic codes, perpetuating socially biased…

Challenges the hypothesis that different linguistic codes are specifically related to different social groups, observing that children's language usage shows qualitative differences determined by the situations they face rather than by their sociocultural background. Supports this observation with an analysis of children's attempts to explain the…

Outlines some of the problems children encounter while developing communicative competency. Discusses ways to assess an individual child's communicative abilities and the ways that language development research can help teachers enhance those abilities. (HTH)

Reports on a study investigating the nature of metaphoric language in children's usage, specifically examining the unconventional word uses of one child between the ages of two years, three months, and four years, ten months. (Author/AM)

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)

Children aged six and eight were required to recall transitive sentences, some with an animate actor and inanimate acted-upon element, and some with these reversed. It appeared that children prefer to put the animate noun first and this affects their choice of active or passive sentence voice. (Author/SJL)

Reviews research on the value of innovative and traditional methods of teaching language and encourages teachers to provide classroom opportunities for students to communicate and to teach language skills. (DD)