Inspired by Syrett (2013), three experiments explored children's ability to distinguish "attributives" (e.g., "three-pound strawberries," where MPs as adjectives signal reference to attributes) versus "pseudopartitives" (e.g., "three pounds of strawberries," where MPs combine with "of" to signal…

Different experimental techniques for empirical assessment of children's linguistic ability have produced conflicting evidence. A number of such contradictions are discussed, in the context of an analysis of the potential weaknesses, and consequent requirements, of both comprehension and production tasks. (A commentary by P. L. Harris appears on…

By analyzing different language tests currently in use for elementary school children, the article criticizes psychometric means of evaluation and ideas about language and language acquisition resulting from psychometric evaluation. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or…

Exploration of the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8 to 14 and 14 to 20 months; established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months; and showed a profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word…

Results of a 10-item oral language test presented only orally, orally with pictures, and orally with concrete aids replicate earlier research findings showing that bilingual children manipulate language more easily than unilinguals. Unilinguals' errors were due to incomplete development while bilinguals' were caused by that and first-language…

Noting that the question of how to evaluate the effect of an educational program on child language reduces to the question of how to analyze child language, the author discusses ways to measure those functional aspects of child language which may be most sensitive to both environmental interferences and environmental facilitations. (Author/JM)

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's acquisition of the non-comparative forms of spatial adjectives and to specifically test the following experimental questions: (1) Are positive-pole terms, or those such as "big," which indicate extent along a dimension, acquired earlier than negative-pole terms? (2) Does…

Since pronunciations of vowel clusters are among the most unpredictable letter-sound correspondences in English and therefore children learning to read must often rely on something other than spelling as a clue to pronunciation of vowel cluster words, data relating to pronunciation frequencies of certain vowel clusters were gathered for this…

Examines a multicontextual aspect of language proficiency that sociolinguists refer to as "communicative competence." Offers a procedure for its application. (PD)

Discusses the establishment of a morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) index as opposed to the standard mean-length of utterance (MLU) for measuring the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. (EKN)

Acquisition of the words "this" and "that" was tested by a comprehension and a production task with children aged 4 and 7. It was confirmed that children would learn the spatial contrast between the words and apply it from the speakers viewpoint; non-egocentrism was not deemed necessary for correct use. (CHK)

The study reports the results of the analysis of Comprehension-Production Test in the kindergarten of two bilingual schools (L-1 English/L-2 French, L-1 Spanish/L-2 English) in the San Francisco Bay area. The tests used covered 14 formal contrasts of English. Parallel tests for Spanish and French were developed by translating the English test.…

Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an…

Reports on a study designed to: (1) produce a multiple-choice test which would measure children's comprehension of figurative language, and (2) obtain information about the development of figurative language comprehension in children. (Author/AM)