A number of claims made by Bereiter and Engelmann, two of the strongest proponents of the verbal-deprivation hypothesis, are examined in light of data gathered during a longitudinal study of two children acquiring Black English Vernacular. The "giant-word syndrome" and its proposed concomitants of absence of developmental stages, deviant…

Imitation in the speech of the child serves at least three functions in the development of linguistic competence. Imitation provides auditory feedback for phonological and morpho-syntactic accuracy, produces a model for verification and/or clarification by speakers, and "makes time" for the processing and acquisition of information. Beyond these…

Failure in FL teaching is caused primarily by the theoretical view of language on which methodology has been based. A new theoretical base is required which is to be found in psycholinguistic research. The purpose of this paper is to inform the FL teacher of recent results of such research. (Author/KM)

To investigate cross-sectionally and longitudinally the development of children's early verbal behavior, 10 normal first-born Japanese infants from middle-class families were observed monthly and examined from when they were 6 to 24 months of age. Audio- and video-taped language data were obtained in a laboratory playroom setting during 15-minute…

To discover the truth about the extent of children's reading vocabularies, a project was undertaken at the Falk Laboratory School, University of Pittsburgh, to determine how many words first, second, and third grade children could recognize in print. A team of graduate students tabulated the words appearing in commonly used basal materials and in…

A study identified the homophones most commonly used in children's writing and showed how the relative use of specific homophones changes as writing skill develops. Homophones appearing in Rinsland's "A Basic Vocabulary of Elementary School Children," a vocabulary list compiled from a national sample of children's writing in grades 2…

Studies of the acquisition of word meaning and the semantic features involved have been mostly confined to noun categories and polar adjectives. Investigation of the semantic categories underlying verb forms has implications not only for theories of child language acquisition but also for theories of semantic structure in general. Experimental…

This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

Isolated examples of creative adaptation show that Jean Piaget's theories of childhood development provide the conscientious teacher with a veritable warehouse of innovative and thought-provoking principles with which to construct a meaningful foundation of language arts experimentation. The elementary Piagetian principles for evoking creativity…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

In order to establish an initial data source for elementary level home-based intervention programs, 18 dyads of second-graders and their parents were divided into three mutually exclusive achievement groups and observed while completing an instructional tool introduced into the home by the childs' school. Parent/child interactions were stimulated…

Children can acquire written language skills and abilities through the natural process by which they acquire oral language. If as infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, children are exposed to rich print environments, they transfer assumptions from experiences with oral dialogue to the more focused situations of print. Discrepancies in the ease with…

Over a three-year period, researchers at Harvard Project Zero investigated metaphoric abilities in children, documenting the development of their metaphoric production, comprehension, and preference, as well as the interrelationships among these skills. Two other areas of literary skills that were investigated were the child's understanding of…

To ascertain what type of environment exists in elementary classrooms in the United States to stimulate oral language, questionnaires were mailed to 500 classroom teachers. Data from the 412 respondents indicated that 83% believed their college courses in language arts had not prepared them to encourage the development of children's language, and…

This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…