A study is undertaken to determine whether the nonlinguistic priority of the agent of an action facilitates the comprehension of word reference. The subjects were twelve male and twelve female infants at the one word stage of language production. The children were presented with three nonsense names (presented as part of a narration of a filmed…

The purpose of this study is to compare the English syntactic structures produced in spontaneous oral language and the receptive English syntactic and vocabulary skills of bilingual Spanish and Indian children and monolingual Anglo-Americans, all of whom qualify for Title I elementary schools (Grades 1-6). People in Action, the Northwestern Syntax…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…

A previous study found that middle-class Hebrew-English bilingual children were characterized by distinctive perceptual strategies and more advanced processing in certain verbal tasks, as compared to similar monolinguals. The present study tested whether similar strategies and response patterns will appear when the children involved are from…

Research was conducted to study systematically the comprehension and production of the pronouns "he, she, him, her" in the language of normal and linguistically deviant children. The purposes of the study were to: observe the manner in which normal children comprehend and produce these four pronouns, in terms of both their use and their…

The experiment described in this report investigates second language development and the possibility of determining various levels of language acquisition. The subjects involved are Japanese students learning English. The students are given the task of recalling English kernel sentences after hearing them once. The resulting sentences--the…

The continuum was developed to provide: (1) a uniform measure of student progress and (2) a progress inventory of the ABC Unified School District's Bilingual Multicultural Program. Six components of the Bilingual Multicultural Curriculum are considered in this management system: Spanish Oral Language Development Objectives, Spanish Reading…

This study investigated parents' and teachers' expectations of Auditory-Verbal therapy and the child's language development. Data were collected by questionnaires that were distributed to parents and teachers at three early intervention centers. Twenty matching questionnaires were completed and returned. The results of this study showed that the…

This paper describes the development and use of language training procedures, referred to as cues-pause-point procedures, that rely on behavioral principles and simple and natural teaching procedures and that are exhibited in many normal parent-child or teacher-student verbal interactions. The procedures have been effective in teaching severely…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…

Work with verbal autistic children has demonstrated phonological, syntactic, and semantic production defects which are not understandable solely in terms of a developmental lag, but also suggest aspects of atypical linguistic development. This investigation is a preliminary attempt to test not only the production, but also the perception, of…

Children's self-monitoring of language production, as it is reflected in spontaneous speech repair, was studied. Recordings of the speech of three children aged two to three were analyzed for spontaneous phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic repairs. After tabulation, repairs were identified as "for the listener"…

The 19 papers in this collection cover diversified topics in the general area of psychology and second language learning. No single method of language teaching emerges, but the complexity of second language behavior and the importance of psychology in the field are underlined. Several trends seem to be most prevalent. There is a new focus on the…

A review of the literature on child language reveals little research on overgeneralization in the speech of the bilingual child. Questions arise regarding (1) the existence of interlingual overgeneralizations, and (2) the possibility that monolingual deviations and bilingual code switching might be forms of overgeneralization. Because a model for…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…