Presents a language-awareness (LA) perspective on the concept of autonomy in second-language learning. The article distinguishes between two kinds of LA, examines child development and the role played by metalinguistic knowledge and literacy in first-language acquisition and examines the role played by both kinds of LA in second-language pedagogy.…

The development of the speech production system was investigated among 120 children (ages 4-14 years) and 20 adults. Aerodynamic and acoustic results suggest that men and 14-year-old boys function differently than women and all other groups of children. Data generally suggest that laryngeal and respiratory behavior of children is not easily…

Investigates the 10% to 20% null subject stage in 3-year-olds in Germany and shows that this stage, though long, is not final. Findings indicate that children in this phase use structures found neither in the state of early null subjects nor in adult German, namely, postverbal referential null subjects. Further study is proposed. (94 references)…

Discusses sample lessons incorporating captioned TV that have been found useful in English-as-a-Second-Language classes. Argues that captioned television is a dynamic supplemental teaching aid that an imaginative teacher can embellish with various before-, during-, and after-viewing activities. (Six references) (CK)

Discusses "cued shadowing," during which subjects listen to pairs of words or sentences and repeat a target word signalled by a cue. Rapid semantic and grammatical priming effects have been observed with this technique, both with word and sentence contexts and at different positions within sentence contexts, in normal children and adults, and in…

Describes two experiments using apparent contradictions of the form "Did you like your supper:--I did and I didn't" to show that non-set theoretic interpretive structures are accessible to adults and 3-year-olds. (17 references) (Author/CK)

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed past events with their mothers and completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and understanding of knowledge. Found that theory-of-mind scores were related to memory conversation participation, independent of age and linguistic skill, and to the frequency of…

Reports how children's language skills and mothers' book-reading strategies predict mastery of word inflections in a sample of Finnish children. Three theoretical models were tested on the longitudinal data using path analyses. Suggests direct developmental continuity from producing words and multiword utterances on later inflectional growth, but…

Examined gender and age patterns of diminutive use in conversations between Spanish-speaking Peruvian mothers and their 3- and 5-year-old children. Results confirm previous findings concerning both parents' greater use of diminutives with younger children and children's early acquisition of this aspect of morphology. Findings do not support…

A study examined the ability of 10 two-year-olds to produce minimal pairs of novel trisyllabic words with primary stress on the first or second syllables. The syllables contained dissimilar or similar vowel contrasts to determine if segments affected omission. Omission was more frequent for the first syllable of weak-strong-weak word pairs.…

The semantic differential technique was used to reveal the dimensions describing 4 adults' judgments of 140 conversation samples involving preschool-aged children. Analysis of the association between six speech/language behaviors and judgments on dynamism, maturity, and appeal found that level of phonological accuracy was the only speech/language…

Analysis of Sesotho-speaking children's spontaneous language showed that the acquisition of passives was closely linked to the fact that Sesotho subjects must be discourse topics. It is suggested that a detailed analysis of how passive constructions interact with other components of a given linguistic system is critical for developing coherent and…

Compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children, focusing special attention on breakdown-repair sentences. It was found, overall, that children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative breakdowns than did children and primary caregiver mothers. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomolous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. (Author/CB)

A longitudinal study investigated how a hearing child of deaf parents simultaneously acquired American Sign Language and spoken English. Neither of two unique properties of signed language (personal pronouns or "negative" sign markers) facilitated acquisition of English, suggesting that children's acquisition of grammar is relatively…