Philippine students in grades K-6, representing different socioeconomic classes, participated in individual elicitation sessions. Using Pilipino (Tagalog) as the language of elicitation, experimenters used pictorial stimuli to elicit specific structures of English grammar, in order to discover if the subjects had mastered these structures. Only…

This longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition analyzes the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes in a child bilingual in English and Chichewa (a Bantu lanugage of East Central Africa). The order of acquisition obtained is compared to that obtained by Brown (1973) for monolingual English speaking children and that…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…

Thirty hearing-impaired children at a residential school for the deaf, a day school for the deaf, and a day program for the deaf in a regular public elementary school were shown picture books, asked to tell the story, and asked to respond to specific questions. Results showed that the ability to process questions was related to the structure of…

An understanding of the structure and function of discourse in social communication and in its internal representation to the individuals is sought in this multidisciplinary collection of papers. The approaches are divided into theoretical orientations and empirical orientations. The theoretical papers deal with: (1) comprehension in conversation,…

A longitudinal study was conducted using 18 mildly/moderately retarded 14- and 15-year-olds to investigate word knowledge acquisition and subcategorization features of the words. Retarded children's errors were highly correlated with word frequency. Two interpretations (gradual acquisition of word knowledge and a reorganization theory) are…

With the increasing number of Spanish-English bilingual children in the U.S., both SLPs and researchers must understand speech and language developments in these children--and SLPs also need reliable assessment and intervention approaches for serving bilingual children with language disorders. This comprehensive text is one of the few to offer…

Examined syntactic development in acquisition of Swedish as a first language in normal (L1) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) children, and acquisition of Swedish as a second language (L2). Similarity between SLI learners and L2 learners is evidence against the hypothesis that there is a fundamental L1-L2 difference. Some data are appended.…

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…

An analysis of the use of attenuation (structural or semantic softening of the speech act) and sentence structure in elicited speech acts by normally developing, learning disabled, and developmentally delayed populations is presented. In the normally developing population (1) the development of attenuation strategies is different from structural…

The concept of scaffolding can be used as a framework to argue that a "rich interpretation" in child language is needed in the area of early literacy learning. Child language is the reading-like text language of "prereading" kindergarten children. Two threads (internal and external) of the scaffolding process have been identified. The external…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…