The Last twenty years of claims, counter-claims, and confusion in linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, and the accompanying proliferation of experimental literature without clear growth of knowledge has, if nothing else, demonstrated how remarkably little we can agree upon about language. We don’t seem able to decide on what it is, or where it is (‘out there’ or solely in the mind), let alone why it is. But, at least, our recent experiences have taught us something. We have learned a great deal about how not to proceed; and that, without cynicism, is a very important beginning.

Introduction. Despite a rather extensive literature on the subject, most research on the nature of infant speech can be characterized as impressionistically descriptive, or anecdotal, or speculative, or some combination thereof. Such studies have by and large ignored the structure, function and natural history of early vocal behaviour, an empirically adequate specification of which is a necessary prerequisite to an understanding of the development of infant vocalizations and of their relationship to later linguistic usage. Likewise, reports have generally failed to recognize the dynamic interactions within the developing organism as a whole, eschewing discussion of concomitant neurophysiological maturation and cognitive growth. While detailed consideration falls beyond the scope of the present paper, some insight into the issues involved may be gained from recent treatises dealing with brain development (Jacobson, 1975), myelogenesis (Lecours, 1975) and the ontogeny of cerebral dominance (Zangwill, 1975). Problems relating to speech input and output requirements in acquisition have been treated by Mattingly (1973), and the interplay of physiological-cognitive factors with respect to early speech perception and production has been critically overviewed by Gilbert (1975). Suffice it to say that until experimental evidence can be adduced, interpreted and properly interwoven into a coherent description, definitive theories on the acquisition and development of speech and language must perforce remain only as desiderata.

Derivational morphology is one of the most difficult and least studied of all the areas of linguistic description (cf. Lightner, 1968:71). There are two main problems which are largely responsible for this. The first is the question of morpheme recognition or lexical identity: how similar in meaning or in sound do two words have to be in order for the linguist or language learner to identify a common morphemic unit and thus to see a morphological relationship between the words? (This problem is discussed in detail in Derwing, 1973: 122-6.) Many of the morphological rules which are proposed by linguists, whether morphophonemic or phonotactic in presumed character, are posited primarily, if not solely, in order to capture certain kinds of supposed ‘lexical redundancies,’ i.e., systematic variations which appear in the phonological form of the same morpheme when the morpheme occurs in different syntactic constructions. The viability of all such rules is thus directly contingent upon the assumption that the words involved do, in fact, share a common morpheme. Consider, for example, the morphophonemic rule which Chomsky proposes for English which changes a /d/ to an /s/ before the suffix /lv/, and the phonotactic rule which changes a /d/ plus /i/ or /y/ into a /ž/ before a vowel (1964:90); both of these rules are motivated by the presumed fact that the English words decisive and decision, for example, contain in their ‘underlying’ or ‘lexical’ representations the common morpheme decide. But how does one decide whether this claim is justified for ordinary native speakers of the language, particularly in some of the more problematical cases discussed in Derwing (1973)?

This report contains the results of a preliminary study dealing with the ways in which children between five and six years of age discriminate and learn phonetic elements of spoken language. In particular, it describes differences on a verbal discrimination learning task of stops vs fricatives in CVC syllables.

Language events occur in a temporal domain. Every speech event occupies a span of time and has temporal boundaries beyond which it cannot be reduced (or, presumably, expanded) and remain intelligible. Normal language users operate successfully within these temporal boundaries, both producing and perceiving utterances within the critical limits.

Transformational grammar has attempted to outline the systematic nature of language structure while also stressing the creative aspect of language. Language is systematic in that speakers use a finite number of means to make up their messages, and yet it is creative in that there are an infinite number of individual different messages which are possible in any natural language. In natural languages, however, there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between possible messages—intended or perceived—and possible linguistic realizations, as there exists in conventional or artificial languages. Often it is found in natural languages that a single linguistic form may have two or more meanings. Homonymy, whether it is lexical or syntactic, is an important notion, not only because syntactic ambiguity plays a central role in linguistic theory, but also because its study gives us a better understanding of the systematics of language and of the way we attach meaning to linguistic representations. Hence, the importance of evaluating how speakers deal with syntactic ambiguity in their attempts to understand and to be understood.

Il règne dans le cerveau une activité électrique constante qu’on peut capter sous forme d’ondes transmises par des électrodes fixées à la surface du crâne. En période d’éveil, la fréquence de ces ondes varie de 8 à 12 cycles/sec. en état de relaxation ; c’est ce qu’on appelle les ondes alpha. Cette fréquence peut augmenter jusqu’à 30 cycles/sec. lors d’une activité mentale intensive. Pendant le sommeil, il se produit aussi des variations de fréquence, à partir desquelles on peut déterminer divers niveaux de profondeur.