The inductivist model of language acquisition was tested by comparing the linguistic development of impulsive kindergarten children with that of reflective children, who, in general, make fewer errors on inductive reasoning tasks. The 81 children sampled were tested with the Matching Familiar Figures Test and with measures of syntactic and…

Recent research indicates that interaction patterns between parent and child change according to the increasing language skill of the child. These patterns are linguistically summarized here. All are correlated with the child's age, but many relationships are still unexplored. (Author/KM)

Reports on an experiment conducted on 23 Israeli kindergarteners and 16 Israeli college students, which used a variant of a semantic differential test in order to test the hypothesis that young Israeli children, like adults, ascribe sexual meanings to words without regard to grammatical gender. (Author/AM)

Bilingual children with possible handicapping conditions must be assessed to determine their dominant language, and that further testing must be conducted in their primary mode of communication. This paper explores the issues involved in assessing bilingualism and handicapping conditions of bilingual, culturally different children and evaluates…

A study assessed and compared the syntax in the oral language of six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds with the syntax in the written language of reading instruction textbooks prepared for children of the same age. (HOD)

This paper reports on a case study of a Cantonese-speaking child age 2 and considers the implication of tone acquisition for tone studies in general, and Cantonese tonology in particular. (NCR)

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

In testing kindergartners and first graders in their comprehension of the words "before" and "after," it was found that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. (Author/NCR)

Preschool children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers "very" and "sort of" was experimentally investigated in 64 children. (Author/NCR)

This experiment used two groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers to test for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. (NCR)

The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

Describes the main characteristics of children's talk at home and at school, as they move through the preschool years into the first years of school. (AA)

The system of deriving baby speech from adult speech is discussed. The theory is based on the system of consonantal replacements. (NCR)

Recommends that language teaching be organized by complexity of communication tasks rather than by difficulty of linguistic structure, that learner speech be analyzed on its own terms borrowing methods from child language studies, and that the adjustments in speech that teachers make in talking to students be recognized as such. (MLA)

A thorough knowledge of the relationship of language and reading will lead to more effective teaching than following a list of basic skills. (MKM)