The spoken narratives of 38 normal and language-disordered children (CA 7;6–10;6) were analyzed by describing their departures from the original text during recall. The narrative texts were presented to an adult listener following each child's viewing of a 35-minute film. The following departure types were compared across groups: (a) acceptable departures from the original text meaning, (b) unacceptable departures from the original text meaning, (c) grammatical departures (i.e., agrammatical utterances), (d) exact repetitions of words or phrases, (e) unacceptable departures from the text's meaning correctly repaired, (f) unacceptable departures from the text meaning incorrectly repaired, (g) departures from text meaning left unrepaired, and (h) repaired grammatical departures. Results indicated that both groups used a higher rate of acceptable departures from the original text meaning than any other departure type, with the normal children producing a higher rate of acceptable departures and a lower rate of unacceptable grammatical departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable departures from text meaning. The groups did not differ in their tendency to ignore grammatical departures. Implications for language processing in narrative discourse are discussed.

Three groups of subjects who used English as a second language and who were considered to be at different levels of proficiency in English participated in a study of transfer of learning from English to Yoruba, their native language, and from Yoruba to English. It was predicted that total transfer from one language to the other would decrease with increasing proficiency in English and that transfer from Yoruba to English would be higher than from English to Yoruba at lower levels of proficiency in English. Findings showed rather that total transfer increased with increasing proficiency in English and that transfer from English to Yoruba was higher than from Yoruba to English for all groups. It is concluded that on a verbal transfer task, bilinguals show development from independent to interdependent language systems with increasing proficiency in a second language.

Analysis of data from the first six months of acquisition of English as a second language by a 5-year-old Japanese girl illustrates the role of modular “chunking” and coupling in the second language acquisition process. This process was apparent in the child's pre-copula and copula referential utterances. She produced a large number of creative and novel referential sentences by using a small number of patterns or modules. The same small set of patterns was seen in both adult and peer sessions, although advances in acquisition usually appeared in peer conversation before they were evident in adult session data.