This document reports an investigation of the developmental changes in the use of certain syntactic structures by white, monolingual, middle class five- and seven-year-olds, and of the differences between the syntax of young children and that used in beginning reading textbooks. Approximately half of the publication presents the methods and…

This dissertation is an attempt to characterize the notion "exception to a rule of grammar" within the context of Chomsky's conception of grammar as given in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." This notion depends on a prior notion of "rule government"--in each phrase marker on which a transformational rule may…

A study was conducted to compare the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents, as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detriot metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages 2 1/2 to 5…

This volume of working papers in psycholinguistics, from the "MITA Psycholinguistics Circle", contains the following articles: "Some Problems in the Acquisition of Derived Nouns" (Mika Endo); "World Knowledge in Children's Sentence Comprehension" (Yuki Hirose); "Examining the Including and Excluding Roles of…

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…

This study investigated the effectiveness of a natural environment language training procedure that combined the mand-model procedure and the time delay procedure for the acquisition of noun signs and for the spontaneous use of the signs acquired. One autistic boy, aged 5 years, 4 months with no verbal imitation skills and few movement imitation…

A Papago grammar, intented to help Papago and other junior high, high school and college students learn and appreciate the language and give linguists an overview of the language, contains background information on the language and the book, two grammar units, a unit of five conversations in Papago, and a section of supplementary material. Text…

Papers in this volume include the following: "The Structural Sources of Verb Meaning" (Lila R. Gleitman); "Acquisition of Noun Incorporation in Inuktitut" (Shanley Allen, Martha Crago); "Why Do Children Omit Subjects?" (Paul Bloom); "Acquiring Language in a Creole Setting: Theoretical and Methodological…

Formal definitions are one example of "decontextualized" language use, in which reliance on background knowledge shared with the interlocutor is minimized, and use of conversational devices is avoided. Definitions of English nouns by 137 second- to fifth-grade children, about half of whom were non-native English speakers, were analyzed…

Selected papers include: "From Core to Periphery: A Study on the Directionality of Syntactic Change in Japanese" (Kaoru Horie); "On the Extension of Body-Part Nouns to Object-Part Nouns and Spatial Adpositions" (Yo Matsumoto); "Noun Classes: Language Change and Learning" (Maria Polinsky, Dan Jackson);…

A collection of research in Japanese and Korean linguistics includes: "Repetition, Reformulation, and Definitions: Prosodic Indexes of Elaboration in Japanese" (Mieko Banno); "Projection of Talk Using Language, Intonation, Deictic and Iconic Gestures and Other Body Movements" (Keiko Emmett); "Turn-taking in Japanese…