A series of experiments investigated infants' perception of inherent structural organization in the prosody of utterances. The experiments used a listening preference procedure to test: perceptions of appropriate pauses in child-directed and adult-directed speech; perceptions of appropriate pauses in speech filtered for most segmental features but…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children learning Spanish as a first language learn rules for assigning stress, as opposed to simply memorizing stress for individual words. The subjects were 50 Spanish-speaking preschool children. In one portion of the experiment, they imitated sets of 2, 3, or 4 Spanish nonsense words that were…

In a study of young children's use of conjunction in narrative discourse, different types of discourse were collected from 34 preschool children: visually prompted stories, stories told without visual stimuli, responses to questions about the prompted stories, explanations of a game, and responses in interviews. The discourse was analyzed for the…

A study investigated whether children expect color similarity to be less important than form similarity in object label extensions. Twenty 2-year-olds and 20 3-year-olds were asked to sort objects similar in either color or form in two different situations: (1) the "No Label" condition where children were asked to help the puppet put objects that…

A study investigated the effect of adult correction of grammatical errors during the language learning process. Four girls and four boys, ages 2 and 3, were interviewed individually, tape recorded and asked to repeat an adult sentence exactly. Overt mistakes were corrected either with an overt correction with expansion or with expansion only,…

A study of children's egocentrism in their use of person and case examined whether 7-year-olds would tend to cast themselves as subjects in sentences using the verbs "give, show, say, tell, and lend," and what role they might assign the hearer. In 85 utterances, the children (N=17), with an average age of 7.8 years, showed the expected…

A longitudinal study of the language development of children of adolescent mothers followed 20 adolescent and 20 older mothers from their children's birth through three years of age. This report is based on data collected from a subsample of 20 mothers. Mother-child interactions in feeding, teaching, and play at eight months and two years were…

A study identified discourse patterns in potential disputes, deflected disputes, incomplete, and completed disputes from a one-hour conversation involving two 3-year-old female children and one female adult. These varied dispute episodes were identified, coded, and analyzed using a pragmatic model of adult argumentation focusing on the structures,…

A study investigated the kinds of questions children ask as they encounter written language. Data were gathered over a 7-month period for two boys, one approximately 4, the other approximately 2 years of age. Two types of observation sessions were used: formal story reading times that were audiorecorded, and informal situations where the…

Two studies were conducted to determine the effects of specific learning centers on preschoolers' functional uses of language. It was hypothesized (1) that different centers would elicit different functions of language and (2) that contexts which promote fantasy play would elicit more multifunctional utterances than would other contexts. In the…

The teaching of politeness formulas and their spontaneous use by young children were investigated. The use of such formulas as greetings and thanks was studied in terms of the cultural features that may interact with the learning of such formulas and the analyses children make concerning the situations in which they are used. Conversations were…

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study…

Data from a language development project at the Polytechnic of Wales were used to compare the speech and writing of 48 monolingual English-speaking children. The 48 children came from three groups, aged 8, 10, and 12. For the collection of spoken data, the children, divided into groups of three, were tape recorded while they made a construction…

Type of discourse and syntax are related; speech researchers will have to specify type of discourse for their results to be comparable with other studies. (JH)

The interaction between theoretical linguistics and language teaching has historically been problematic. This interaction is viewed here from the standpoint of educational linguistics, which is the intersection of linguistics and related language sciences with formal and informal education. The issue is the relevant educational problem that…