First Language

Recent studies of the language of children in nursery schools paint a bleak picture of infrequent and unimaginative interactions between adults and children and limited conversations about the here-and-now of the nursery (Thomas 1973, Tizard 1976, Wood 1980, Silva 1980). But these global portraits may mask important differences in the discourse of individual children whose language styles may be varied and distinct. Most of the studies concentrate on adult-child interactions and do not describe the conversations which take place when children play on their own. This study describes the language styles of 10 children in the same open plan nursery school by analysing discourse in terms ofAmount, Moves and Meanings. Although the broad findings are in agreement with previous descriptions of the language of children and adults in nursery schools, the results conceal some important differences in the language of individual children, of boys and girls, of children from different home backgrounds, and of conversations between children compared to adult-child interactions. Language profiles for the 10 children are quite distinct and show that there is considerable variation in who the children choose to talk to, what they talk about and how they talk. Consequently the knowledge they gain from their nursery experiences (whether about things, ideas or people) is also very different.

In recent years the role of general cognitive development in language acquisition has been stressed (e.g. Piaget, Sinclair). However, most often this relationship is implied, rather than empirically verified. This paper provides data for both linguistic and cognitive functioning in the same children. It is concerned with the acquisition of active/passive sentences (synonymy judgement) and temporally, causally, and conditionally related sequences in relation to 'reversal skills'. Ability to relate active and passive sentences in order to judge meaning equivalence and the ability to reverse clause order to correspond with event order and/or cause-effect is dependent on the child's ability to perform reversible operations as involved in conservation tasks. The concept of time is supposed to be spatial in origin (seriation tasks), and an understanding of relational time is dependent on the ability to decentre and coordinate (picture arrangement task). Also conditionals require reversible transformations and coordination of several internal structures.

Only at the age from 5 to 7 and onwards can children comprehend the complex structures in question, if they have to rely on syntactic information alone for their interpretation, but if the child can rely on his knowledge of the world, he can begin to interpret/produce these structures already at the age of 3, that is before he has achieved reversible operations.

The spontaneous speech of fifteen children was examined in order to test two hypotheses: (1) newly acquired forms are first used to express previously acquired meanings; (2) newly acquired meanings are first expressed by pre viously acquired forms. The data provide support for these hypotheses, but also demonstrate other relations between the acquisition of linguistic forms and meanings. The implications of the findings for theories of language development are briefly considered.

The study reported in this paper investigated the developmental pattern of cohesive ties realized through the free writing of children aged six and ten years. The proportional usage, both of cohesive ties to quantity of text and of the various ties to one another, are identified. Differences of usage as functions of age and sex are also considered.