Ninety-five children in 28 nursery school classrooms were used to investigate the relationships between teacher facilitative or directive verbal behavior in nursery school classrooms and seven aspects of child language change (receptive vocabulary, vocabulary of use, mean length of response, complexity of sentences, inquiry statements, dramatic…

Adult "redoing" sequences (expansions and repeats) in conversations between adult and child (age 1;6) are analyzed with a conversational analytic approach, and two ways in which redoing sequences are involved in the initiation of repair are explored. It is proposed that a redoing sequence picks up a child's utterance and displays it for some kind…

The acquisition of negative forms by a Jordanian Arabic speaker as evidenced in utterances from 19 months of age is examined. The language corpus consisted of selective samples of spontaneous daily speech and biweekly recorded speech sessions. Results suggest that although the subject's negation system is incomplete, it will be acquired by age 5.…

Changes in mothers' strategies for eliciting verbal responses (EVR's) as a function of child age were investigated in this study. Seven mother-child dyads were observed in their homes when the children were 16, 21, 24, 30, and 34 months of age. Mother EVR's were coded according to syntactic form, type of cue for child response, and complexity of…

Study of the use of baby talk in parental speech can illuminate the parent-child relationship, acquisition of adult language, the permissible modifications to language structure without diminishing meaning, and code-switching. This is illustrated in the baby talk embedded in adult-child conversation in the context of family and household in three…

The intricate quilt pattern of child language development can be pieced together from the numerous swatches of each child's language fabric which have been gathered by watching, looking, and listening when young children write. The necessity of watching, looking, and listening is demonstrated by the example of a preschooler's verbal protocol which…

The focus assigned to sentential negatives is investigated in 7- and 10-year-olds and adults. Two cues are considered as pragmatic indicators of the sentence component(s) to which the negative operator is applied. One is the articles: it is proposed that an indefinite noun phrase is taken within the scope of a negative and a definite noun phrase…

A study investigated how children report epistemic modality and focused on two main questions: (1) How do children reproduce modal devices that are present in the original (to-be-reported) discourse? and (2) How do children use different linguistic means of quotation--direct, indirect, or other--in this situation? Sixty monolingual French-speaking…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

It is useful to stress the similarity of the linguistic system that underlies oral and written language, but the whole language approach fails to take into account the real and significant differences that exist between oral and written language and the different purposes for which they are used. Children need explicit guidance and support in…

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

A study investigated Japanese children's acquisition of the syntactical subcategorization of action verbs. Aspects of caregiver language that provide children with information about the characteristics of an action verb are detailed, and the utterances of four Japanese toddlers are analyzed for their usage characteristics. Caregiver sentences are…

Three experiments investigated the development in young children of two concepts: the antecedent possibilities for reflexives (e.g., himself or herself) and pronouns (e.g., him or her). In the first experiment, 156 English-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;6 and 21 adults were tested for their understanding of antecedents within reflexive sentences,…

A study examined the consistency of consonant use in the infant's transition period from babbling to early words. Phonetic data were collected from the speech of 10 infants aged 9 to 15 months. Analysis of consonant distribution patterns indicate striking segmental preferences in all 10 children, with some segments more prominent for the sample as…