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The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children's growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0-3;0, covering both child autonomous productions and adult-child co-constructed CC. Based on four phases in CC construction shared by the three children, the following developmental trends were identified for both coordination and subordination in our database. First, children start combining two predications with lexical verbs early on, but these are confined to non-marked or adult-supported constructions. Second, early connective-marked CC involves mainly verbless copular or existential clauses. And autonomously produced lexical-verb combinations marked by connectives emerge several months later. This initial "trade-off" and gradual progression in grammatical specificity to full-fledged, lexically marked CC is interpreted as reflecting the developmental route of children's early clause integration in interactive discourse.

The study characterizes developmental trends in early Hebrew clause-combining (CC) by analyzing the interplay between linguistic form and communicative function in different interactional settings. Analysis applied to all utterances produced by three children aged 2;0-3;0 who combined two or more clauses, either self-initiated or on the basis of adult input. Ten types of CC were analyzed for marking by connectives (e.g. the Hebrew equivalents of "and", "that", "so"). Four shared consecutive developmental phases emerged: non-marking; partial marking by "and" and "that"; use of "but" and "because", favored significantly in interlocutor-supported contexts; marking of adverbial relations and more varied use of še- "that". These CC processes are interpreted as reflecting general properties of language development, in the form of gradually increasing specification of form-function relations under the impact of interlocutor-child interactive support combined with Hebrew-particular typological factors.

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template; Hebrew-specific morpho-syntactic abilities were tested by alternating between bound inflected and free syntactic forms of verbs and nouns; syntactic tasks involved shifting between direct and indirect speech, between single-clause and bi-clausal sentences with subordinate or coordinate clauses, and construction of well-formed sentences from scrambled groups of words. Across the board, participants encountered more difficulty in shifting from low frequency, high-register, structurally more fused constructions typical of written usage to their everyday, more transparent options than vice versa. High-school adolescents responded like the adults on most tasks, differing significantly from grade-school and junior-high-school students. These results are interpreted in terms of linguistic and developmental variables underlying the protracted path to acquisition of high-level linguistic flexibility.

The second book edition of Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches eliminated jokes about drinking and religion. Although these were small changes, the edgy theme of drinking and religion as topics that could and sometimes should be taken lightly (even by a writer who also considered both topics as serious) interested Alcott throughout her career. Jokes on drinking and religion, although not a major element in any one of Alcott's stories (and not present at all in "Little Women," published the year before the reprint of "Hospital Sketches" and written while negotiations for the reprint were going on), were recurrent in her work generally and added up to a substantial element in her humorous attacks on pomposity.

In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization--schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative analyses applied to 160 personal-experience narratives and expository essays written by schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults on the shared topic of interpersonal conflict point to certain apparently contradictory facts about developing discourse abilities in the 2 genres. For example, genre differentiation is established early on (even the youngest children distinguish between the 2 types of discourse), but with age, participants tend to diverge from genre-typical content (by including expository-type generalizations in narratives and narrative-like incidents in expository texts). Also, across age groups, in local linguistic expression, participants use more advanced vocabulary and grammar in expository than in narrative texts, but in global-level discourse organization, they achieve command of expository text construction only in adolescence, whereas the principles governing narratives are established by middle childhood. We suggest that this apparent paradox can be accounted for by several interlocking factors: cognitive and linguistic development, increased experience with different varieties of discourse, and the communicative context in which a piece of discourse is produced.

This study compares what we term information density in spoken versus written discourse by distinguishing between 2 broad classes of material in narrative texts: narrative information as conveyed through three types of propositional content--events, descriptions, and interpretations (Berman, 1997)--and ancillary information as conveyed by nonnovel, nonreferential, or nonnarrative material. One hundred sixty texts were analyzed across the variables of modality (writing, speech), development (4th-, 7th-, and 11th-grade students compared with adults), and language (English, Hebrew). Calculation of information density revealed no significant differences between languages, indicating that the analysis has general applicability. Increase in narrative information proved to be a function of modality rather than age, because, across the population, spoken texts contained far more ancillary material than written. By contrast, the nature of narrative content changed as a function of development, with interpretive material increasing with age. The study thus underscores 2 key features of narrative text construction: Modality has a distinct effect on information density, and, with age, the core of narrative information (events and descriptions) becomes fleshed out by interpretive and story-external elements.

This article considers how children and young people conceptualize and construct different types of texts. The initial parts of narrative and expository texts written by grade-schoolers, adolescents, and adults were analyzed, on the assumption that the opening to a piece of discourse serves as a window on the text as a whole. Analysis was conducted on 3 dimensions: discourse functions--providing background in narratives and introducing the topic in expository texts; organizational pivot--temporality in narratives and generality in expository texts; and linguistic forms--verb tense and semantics in narratives and nominal structure and content in expository texts. The openings to narrative texts emerge as better constructed at an earlier age than in expository texts, but fully proficient openings are a late development in both cases. We attribute this to the fact that, for younger children, the spoken modality and narrative mode of discourse predominate; however, with age and greater literacy, expository discussion increasingly shapes the way people think and give written expression to their thoughts.

The paper examines two types of texts, personal experience narratives and expository discussions, dealing with the shared theme of interpersonal conflict. Both were produced by the same 80 subjects, participants in a crosslinguistic study on developing literacy: gradeschoolers aged 9;0 to 10;0, twelve-to-thirteen-year-old junior high school students, sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old high school students, and graduate-level university students. The study reported here aims to demonstrate that inter-genre differentiation is evident from an early age and is reflected by distinct forms of expression across different interlocking linguistic systems. In keeping with the focus on relations between linguistic forms and discourse functions that motivates our study, we further aim to show how particular grammatical elements can fulfill different discourse functions across development. To this end, we analysed several different lexical and morphosyntactic constructions in 160 Hebrew-language texts as diagnostic of inter-genre distinctiveness: subjectless constructions; verbless copular clauses; verb types and the temporal categories of verb tense and mood, including lexical expressions of modality in the two genres. Results show that narratives are clearly distinguished from expository texts along all these dimensions; these distinctions are evident from the youngest age group we considered; and with age, inter-genre differentiation emerges as more moderately dichotomous. We concluded from this that maturely proficient text construction is able to combine expository-type generalizations with narrative event-description and to intersperse narrative-type illustrative episodes with expository formulation of ideas.

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar, and how emergent grammar is reflected in the acquisition of fully inflected forms of verbs. Children's early verb repertoire indicates that they possess a strong basis for moving into the expression of a variety of semantic roles and the syntax of a range of different verb-argument structures. On the other hand, children's initial use of verbs demonstrates that they still need to acquire considerable language-particular grammatical knowledge in order to encode such relations explicitly. This language-particular knowledge demonstrates a clear pattern of acquisition, in which aspect precedes inflectional marking for gender, followed by tense, and then by person. (Contains 1 footnote.) [This research was supported by the Humboldt Foundation.]

Relates why nineteenth century fantasy writers shied away from the use of dragons in their stories and rejoices over the return and happy transformation of this mythical beast in children's literature. (HOD)

The distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses. (Author/SED)

Examination of the types of linguistic knowledge that affect three- to nine-year-olds' (N=60) and adults' (N=12) ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew revealed that comprehension was achieved ahead of production. Knowledge of morphological form had little effect on comprehension, but was crucial to production. (Author/CB)

Discusses the need for both a "rule of thumb" grammar and more thorough grammatical rules in second language teaching. (AM)

Research with young Hebrew-speaking children revealed a development in linguistic control of the system of verb-pattern alternation from nonalternation to near mastery, with the concepts of causativity and distinctions in transitivity being lexicalized earlier than others. (Author)

Discusses the establishment of a morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) index as opposed to the standard mean-length of utterance (MLU) for measuring the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. (EKN)