Kindergarten kissing games; four-year-olds playing doctor; a teacher holding a crying child on his lap as he comforts her. Interactions like these - spontaneous and pleasurable - are no longer encouraged in American early childhood classrooms, and in some cases they are forbidden. The quality of the lives of our children and their teachers is thereby diminished, contend the contributors to this book. In response to much-publicised incidents of child abuse by caretakers, a "moral panic" has swept over early childhood education.
In this final volume in the series, the contributors attempt to "expand the contexts" in which child language has been examined crosslinguistically. The chapters build on themes that have been touched on, anticipated, and promised in earlier volumes in the series. The study of child language has been situated in the disciplines of psychology and linguistics, and has been most responsive to dominant issues in those fields such as nativism and learning, comprehension and production, errors, input, and universals of morphology and syntax.
Ariel Jardell, an adopted 12-year-old girl, is possessed, her mother thinks, by jealousy and by forces far more bizarre. An unnerving tale woven together with a fascinating, terrifying child at the center of each twist and turn it takes, this book gives new definition to the old conflict of good versus evil, sane versus insane.
This book examines child second language acquisition within the Principles and Parameters theory of Universal Grammar (UG). Specifically, the book focuses on null-subjects in the developing grammars of children acquiring English as a second language. The book provides evidence from the longitudinal speech data of four child second language (L2) learners in order to test the predictions of a recent theory of null-subjects, namely, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP). Lakshmanan argues that the child L2 acquisition data offer little or no evidence in support of the MUP’s predictions regarding a developmental relation between verb inflections and null-subjects.
In his quest to unravel the threads left by his brother's death in Cambodia, Thomas Reed travels to the streets of Manila and the jungles of Cambodia, where he gradually pieces together the information that will lead him to his brother's lost child.
