Speech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of children's question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a child's linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the child's growing linguistic knowledge.

The notion of competence as it applies to child language is critically assessed in the light of evidence collected from a number of linguistic performances which share the same word-order rule. These performances – production, comprehension, judgment and correction – parallel Moravcsik's (1969) formulation of Chomsky's criteria for tacit knowledge of a rule, i.e. competence. It was found that these criteria are not all satisfied until the child is four or five years old, as the performances appear at very different points in time. Alternative criteria for tacit knowledge are suggested, with specific models of each performance replacing a general model of competence for early child speech.

Clark's (1973) hypothesis about the acquisition of semantics proposed that young children learn the meanings of words component by component, and that, within any given semantic field, they acquire the full adult meanings for the semantically simpler terms before they acquire the semantically more complex ones. The semantic field investigated in the present study was that of kinship terms. A new analysis of kin terms, employing relational components, was used to predict the relative order of acquisition of the terms. Definitions of 15 kin terms were elicited from children aged 3;5–8;10. The data showed that semantic complexity played an important role in determining the order of acquisition, and thus provided support for both the relational analysis of kin terms and the semantic acquisition hypothesis.

There are very general phonological processes which appear to operate in one form or another when any child learns a first language. This study attempts to outline and exemplify the most general of these, e.g. the reduction of consonant clusters, the deletion of unstressed syllables. In addition, the study criticizes the point of view that phonological development consists primarily of the child substituting one sound for another. Rather, phonological development reflects very general processes that affect entire classes of sounds. Lastly, the study suggests that identifying general rules can ultimately lead to more insightful information concerning separate strategies that individual children follow.

A test was designed to throw light on how three- to five-year-old Tamil children comprehend two complex sentence types, one of them ambiguous for adult speakers and involving alternating Ns and Vs in surface form (NVNV), the other unambiguous and with clustering Ns and Vs (NNVV). The results indicate that neither of the age groups tested showed adult comprehension of either construction, but apparently relied on certain strategies of perception which are sensitive to features of surface syntactic form rather than to assumed real-world probabilities. The NVNV type yielded the largest proportion of ‘correct’ responses (in terms of the adult model), and also of favoured responses (in terms of syntactic strategies that may be postulated to account for the data); but another relevant variable turned out to be the order in which the constituent structures were probed; probing the internal predicate first enhanced the probability of favoured responses, for both the constructions tested.

A survey is made of recent studies of child language acquisition (mainly between 1968 and mid-1973) performed in the Soviet Union and several other East European countries. Part 1 is a general evaluation of the present state of research on child language in this area; part II includes a survey of the following subfields of developmental research: (1) integrated description of early language; (2) phonology; (3) intonation; (4) grammar; (5) lexis; (6) characteristics of child speech communication.

This report describes a perceptual study on the ability of mothers to perceptually differentiate cry samples elicited by three different stimulus situations. In some instances mothers were evaluating cries produced by their own infant; in other cases they judged those produced by infants with whom they were unfamiliar. The results of the investigation indicated that the eighteen mothers were generally unable to successfully match the cry samples with the three cry-evoking situations. Further, no differential advantage was found when mothers were judging samples produced by their own infant.

According to Schlesinger (1973) there are two errors in our research on language development: (a) we attribute too much underlying structure to child utterances; (b) we interpret child language in terms of adult language. In response, we restate the types of evidence we have used to derive semantic representations for child utterances, and emphasize that only such representations can make sense of the way the child uses his language. One of the reasons that child sentences are brief in comparison with the structure they communicate is that the child communicates by using the immediate situation. He constructs parts of the semantic structure not conceptually but at the sensory–motor level and communicates them deictically. Nevertheless the entire structure is under the child's control. We further clarify our notion of adverbial, which has permitted us to conclude that adverbials are absent in very early speech.