The use of the verbs "go" and "come" was examined in the spontaneous speech of seven two-year-olds. As verbs of motion, the words were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This is considered crucial in explaining children's difficulty in discriminating the verbs in…

Author brings together from some major sources what we know about metaphor and suggests some questions for systematic study concerning children and metaphor. (Editor)

Found no correlations between types of play behavior and speech measures, that identification of objects upon verbal request was not related to any type of play behavior, and that comprehension of verbal requests for functional or representational play was positively correlated with the display of such play. Journal availability: J. B. Lippincott…

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

Reviews research concerning language acquisition in infants, particularly the acquisition of syntax. Topics of discussion include the problem of language acquisition, theories of language acquisition, and the progression from competing hypotheses to mutually reinforcing theories. (RJC)

The acquisition of Spanish as a first language was investigated in a study of eight Puerto Rican children ranging in age from 17-39 months. The speech of the four children studied in Puerto Rico was analyzed in detail and compared with that of the four children taped in Boston. The children's speech was taped in natural situations and analyzed in…

This article reports on a study to determine the role of intonation in language acquisition. Related studies are mentioned. Research methods for the study are outlined and two case studies are reviewed. Conclusions show that adult-child interaction influences not only the child's use of intonation but also his acquisition of syntax. (Text is in…

The following are sketched in outline form: (1) functional antecedents and their implications for language--assimilation, accommodation, circular reactions/ feedback processes, classification, discrimination, functional equivalence, representation, transformation, communications; (2) semantic antecedents and their implications for language--human…

Vocalizations of two female infants, recorded over a five-week period after the first emergence of cooing were studied. It was found that the features of the more primitive sound types regrouped themselves in comfort sounds. The implications for theories of prespeech development are discussed. (EJS)

The development of plurals in two German-speaking children was analyzed, based on observational data. It was argued that the children were learning plurals by rote, conditioned by morphological complexity which cannot be subsumed under any general rule. (Author/NCR)

This article discusses the popular belief that girls are more advanced in language development than boys. (Author/NCR)

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

Focus is one factor that may account for children's use of single-word utterances after they have acquired the use of multi-word utterances. The possible role that focus may play in children's use of single-word utterances in naturalistic settings, after the acquisition of syntax, was investigated. (SW)