Examined how rules for interpreting empty category (EC) subjects of complement clauses vary crosslinguistically across structural and lexical dimensions. Twenty-three Greek-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds and 10 adults, 29 Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, 18 6- and 7-year-olds, and 8 adults took part in act-out experiments. Results indicate an…

Recommends talking to children to help them develop language skills. Identifies daily routines (mealtime, bath time, dressing, play) as ideal opportunities to engage in parallel talk, describing out loud what the child is seeing, hearing, or thinking during the activity and suggests self-talk as parents perform routine actions around the home.…

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Presents evidence for four major design features of serial organization of speech arising from comparison of babbling and early speech with patterns in ten languages. Maintains that no explanation for the design features is available from Universal Grammar; except for intercyclical consonant repetition development, perceptual-motor learning seems…

Examines a song spontaneously created by a 44-month old. Finds that the relationship of the structure and functions of the song demonstrated the variation of egocentric speech connected to the child's thinking. Concludes that observation of form and content of such language use can provide information about language development, sense of self, and…

Surveyed groups of Chinese, Malay and Tamil families, their use of community languages or mother tongue, and their speaking, reading, and writing proficiency. Found that when parents' community language proficiency in speaking is lower they tend to choose English as preferred language. Children's language confidence affected their language choice.…

Discusses verbal strategies used by young children to express and construct a sense of togetherness. Presents the case study of one child, 3-5 years old, in his interactions with other children and teachers. Describes three general mechanisms for expressing togetherness: expression of common ground, of cooperation, and of care. (JPB)

This study investigated the contributions of four variables (children's expressive language scores at 30 months of age, mother's facilitation of child language, mother's education, and group assignment) to the prediction of IQ at age 3, verbal IQ at ages 5 and 8, and reading at age 8 for 571 children of low-birthweight. Four separate multiple…

This article presents a selective review of the work carried out recently in second language acquisition (SLA) research which makes use of oral learner corpora and computer technologies. In the first part, the reasons why the field of SLA needs corpora for addressing current theoretical issues are briefly reviewed. In the second part, recent…

This guide offers advice on the assessment of the language development abilities of bilingual preschool children. A brief review of general bilingual child language development, including mixing and loss or semilingualism, is followed by a review of current assessment practices. A language assessment procedure developed for the State of California…

An analysis of language acquisition in English and Dutch focuses on a theory of phrase structure. It is argued that the previously posited phrase structure operations of projection and adjunction can be dispensed with in favor of the single operation of "merge." One version of merge is shown to account for a range of data from child English and…

Part of a larger study on pre-school children's ability to use the computer to create art, a study examined the language children used as they were exposed to and trained to use a computer software program. Subjects were 4 preschool children (4 or 5 years of age). Audio and video recordings of the children over 8 sessions yielded a total of 1,501…

A child's need for formal communication may be as much an emotional need as a cognitive need. Several theories attempt to explain children's language development, including the theories developed by B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and J. Bruner. Most children typically follow a standard sequence of language development: crying and cooing, babbling,…

A study investigated the patterns of question use in Mandarin Chinese-speaking parents' and caregivers' interactions with children, and how they characterize social class differences. Subjects were 10 children, aged 21-23 months, and their families, selected from immunization records in Beijing, China. Parents were all native speakers of Mandarin…

A study on children's speech is prefaced by an extensive theoretical discussion. An attempt to construct a taxonomy that captured psychologically real, discrete types of communicative acts in mother-child interactions was based on the insight that verbal utterances are social acts that are meaningful in particular social situations. The taxonomy…