Describes a study designed to explore the nature of early use of two forms of the perfect--the present perfect and the present perfect progressive--by children over three years old. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: verb form, semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the…

Describes a study that tried to answer the following: (1) Are the passives of all actional verbs equally easy to understand? (2) Are the passives of all experiential verbs in a child's vocabulary about equally hard to understand? (3) Does comprehension of passives differ from verb to verb in a category? (SED)

This article presents a wholistic picture of the major factors in the language learning process. (RC)

The study indicated some superiority of the Bereiter-Engelmann Program, a structured, behavioristic method, over traditional language instruction methods. (MH)

Draws implications for the teaching and learning of writing from the language acquisition of children, based on the contention that human capacities for acquiring language do not change qualitatively as people mature. (DD)

The prevailing view of phonological development is that changes in pronunciation are driven by phonological changes. This view (it is argued here) derives from the particular form of the data that has most often been used in studies of phonological development, namely broad phonetic transcriptions. Transcribing an earlier pronunciation with one…

In this study we examined early motor, vocal, and communicative development in a group of younger siblings of children diagnosed with autism (Infant Siblings). Infant Siblings and no-risk comparison later-born infants were videotaped at home with a primary caregiver each month from 5 to 14 months, with follow-up at 18 months. As a group, Infant…

Describes a study designed to discover how children approach the mass-count distinction as it applies to the use of "much" and "many." Results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of "much" and "many" with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a…

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

Two studies investigated linguistic representations underlying English-speaking 2.5-year-olds' production of transitive utterances. Findings indicated that children trained with pronouns and nouns could produce a transitive utterance creatively with a novel verb. Results suggest that English-speaking children build many of their early linguistic…

The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

Children's acquisition of agent nouns within a framework of morphological structural principles is explored. Language acquisition has been conceptualized as a process of parameter setting in which the learner is richly endowed with a vocabulary of primitives and rule schemata. Exposure to the primary data will be filled in from the range of…

This article focuses on three aspects of language instruction in early childhood education: a) educational and sociological events which prompt concern over language behavior, b) results of research of the last 10 years, and c) suggestions for curriculum and instruction. (HMD)

To assess children's capacities to effect appropriate "metaphoric links" and to discriminate among metaphors of varying appropriateness, a task probing verbal metaphoric skill was administered to subjects ranging in age from 4 to 19 years. (Author/RM)