Twelve 21/2-year-old children received adult verbal intervention selectively directed toward acquisition of either question forms or verb forms. Findings showed that children who received verb intervention acquired new verb structures while children who received question intervention acquired new forms of questions. (Author/JMB)

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

This paper represents an effort to explain the language development of the child within the analytic frame of overtly observable data and without recourse either to mathematical models or to postulating hypothetical underlying forms. From longitudinal studies of two-year old children conducted by the author as well as from similar data reported in…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…