It is proposed that in studying the development of children's speech, the findings in the data are heavily influenced by what is expected to be found on the basis of our theoretical preconceptions. This phenomenon is actually more widespread than has previously been acknowledged, and our expectations about how children learn language may have to…

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…

Modifications of current assumptions both about the nature of the spoken language and about its functions in relation to personality development are suggested in this book. The discussion covers an explanation of "oracy" (the oral skills of speaking and listening); the contributions of linguistics to the teaching of English in Britain; the…

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…

Several studies have begun to investigate the claim that children can make most phonological discriminations when they begin to speak. This paper investigates how well children aged 2;3 to 2;11 can discriminate between pairs of minimally different real words, and it shows that the results are affected by how well the children know the words. It is…

This paper proposes a broad outline of a variable model of language development and explores several particulars of such a model in the language behavior of four two-year-old children. The process by which information about language is progressively transformed and integrated rather than merely being added together can be seen in the shifting…

This analysis of Brazilian baby talk (BT) includes data from two sources: elicitations of the use of BT from three mothers, all of whom have university degrees, and observations of adult-child interactions in the home. The data shows Ferguson's modified list of thirty lexical items that frequently have BT forms in various languages and the…