The book indentifies and assesses the importance of a range of influences on child language acquisition and development, paying particular attention to situational influences. Key issues are highlighted and recent research is presented. There are five sections: the deployment of speech during early development; linguistic interaction and family background - encoding the situation; multidimentional aspects of language development; and constraints on language development. There are twelve chapters on these themes.

This book presents a framework for the linguistic analysis of speech and a computer program to process the results of this analysis. The model of description for the linguistic analysis is that known as 'scale-and-category' grammar. It is particularly suited for a study of how people use their language, and especially for a sociologically-oriented study of linguistic behaviour. By incorporating a concept of 'delicacy', it enables the investigator to vary, according to his particular interests, the amount of detail he enters into at various points in the description. The present authors have made use of this facility and discuss the special interests, sociological and psychological, that influenced their choice of detail. The computer program analyzes the grammatical structures written in a linear notation. A second version has been written which allows easy modification to handle a variety of grammatical schemes, and the program has application to the processing of the analysis of sequential behaviour in general, especially where there are complex relations between the units analyzed.

This book presents a framework for the linguistic analysis of speech and a computer program to process the results of this analysis. The model of description for the linguistic analysis is that known as 'scale-and-category' grammar. It is particularly suited for a study of how people use their language, and especially for a sociologically-oriented study of linguistic behaviour. By incorporating a concept of 'delicacy', it enables the investigator to vary, according to his particular interests, the amount of detail he enters into at various points in the description. The present authors have made use of this facility and discuss the special interests, sociological and psychological, that influenced their choice of detail. The computer program analyzes the grammatical structures written in a linear notation. A second version has been written which allows easy modification to handle a variety of grammatical schemes, and the program has application to the processing of the analysis of sequential behaviour in general, especially where there are complex relations between the units analyzed.

The book identifies and assesses the importance of a range of influences on child language acquisition and development, paying particular attention to situational influences. Key issues are highlighted and recent research is succinctly presented. There are five sections: the deployment of speech during early development; linguistic interaction and family background: encoding the situation; multidimentional aspects of language development; and constraints on language development. There are twelve chapters on these themes contributed by leading researchers in this area.