A description of the language curriculum at the Harrisville School in New Hampshire, a school for children age 4-7. Language use is encouraged as part of the children's natural interaction with other children, materials, and teachers. (BD)

The achievement of labeling was investigated in a longitudinal study of one mother-infant dyad, using video-recordings and analysis of joint picture-book reading. Participating in a ritualized dialogue, rather than imitation, was found to be the major mechanism through which labeling was achieved. (Author/SW)

This work investigated the young child's ability to respond appropriately to the intended, as opposed to the literal, meaning of one class of such utterances, requests for action. An action-based response heuristic is proposed to explain the apparent ability of two-year-olds to deal with indirect speech acts. (Author/SW)

Examination of the productive narrative competence of three five-year-olds revealed that the children routinely and regularly produced a striking variety of 14 narrative forms. Seventy percent of the narratives took anecdotal form, and original fantasy narratives occurred only rarely. (Author/CB)

Sets forth educational inferences drawn from a classroom incident involving a first-grade child and her first story writing experience. (FL)

Describes a teacher's metamorphosis from a controlling kindergarten teacher to one who recognized that children already have a great deal of language and print awareness and who could assist them in self-directed learning by giving their language instruction a context. (HTH)

When lexical availability was manipulated through discourse support and word frequency for 40 target nouns, measurement of effects on length, complexity, order of mention, and fluency of 4- to 8-year-olds' utterances showed that the number and length of responses containing the target word varied with age, word frequency, and discourse support…

Production of the deictic verbs "bring" and "take" was evaluated among 88 normally functioning elementary school children. Results showed that data evaluation procedures greatly influenced conclusions, the second-to-emerge form was easier to learn in a conventional way, and the second term was the proactive stimulus for…

Parents of three Down's Syndrome infants, aged 2-8 months, provided continuous reinforcement for vocalization (CRF) and differential reinforcement of other-than-vocalization (DRO). All infants produced systematically higher vocalization rates during CRF, even though the amount of social stimulation during DRO was equal to or greater than the…

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Exploration of the extent to which acculturation may be related to classroom second-language acquisition in Turkish immigrant children reared in the Netherlands found that the relationship was significant and positive, but not really high. (Author/CB)

Records the attempts of a very young child to construct his own understanding of what it means to die and of the social impact of death within his own culture. Includes transcripts in which the child uses narrative to frame his first, tentative ideas about death and responds to literature to further extend his understanding. (JD)

Describes a study done to determine whether the degree of children's familiarity with component words was related to (1) their ability to produce productive patterns as opposed to associative and grouping patterns, and (2) their ability to use broader scope rather than lexically based patterns. (SED)

Traces the development of predicate use for genre and cohesion in the narratives of children aged two to five, examining predicate structures and types and their linkages via three types of parallelism and by means of explicit connectives. (Author/SED)

Discusses the interactional state referred to by speakers of Hebrew as "brogez" as an example of the ritual regulation of conflict. Identifies specific forms and strategies of this type of interaction as they are used by Israeli children and their relevance to children's communicative competence. (SED)