PREFACE

Werner F. Leopold’s Bibliography of child language, published in 1952, was a landmark in the field. It brought together for the first time in one listing a huge Western European and American literature on a richly fascinating subject. Leopold’s original bibliography, with his valuable personal notes, served as a guide for several generations of investigators of language development in the child. His influence can be felt in the several thousand post-1952 entries in this revision.

In time, of course, bibliographies must become dated—as will this one as well. And so, in 1967, Indiana University Press initiated a revision of Leopold’s work. The field had grown exceptionally rapidly in the intervening fifteen years. At the same time, American investigators were beginning to make contact with Eastern European and Japanese research, and scholars continued to discover occasional older works of merit which had even escaped the exceedingly fine-tooth comb of Professor Leopold. An augmented revision was clearly in order. The current pace of publication has not allowed for the leisurely and intimate notes of the first edition. The reader is urged to consult the earlier volume for Leopold’s reactions to many of the pre-1952 references. The user of the present edition will have at his disposal a series of content codes following each entry and a large cross-index at the back of the volume. The content codes were devised by the original editorial committee of Professors David L. Olmsted of the University of California at Davis, Charles A. Ferguson of Stanford University, and Dan I. Slobin of the University of California at Berkeley. The codes cover a field somewhat less broad than that covered in the first edition, as the committee decided to restrict the second edition to publications dealing primarily with questions of the acquisition of the linguistic system itself. Therefore we decided to omit works dealing with such topics as formal instruction in first or second language, language development after puberty, physiological and anatomical treatises not directly concerned with child language, speech therapy, mental testing, and the influence of language on other forms of behavior and other aspects of child development. In return, we hope to have prepared as exhaustive a compendium as possible of writings on the child’s acquisition of language, covering research in America, Western and Eastern Europe, and, to a lesser extent, Japan; and embracing a time span from 1250 to June 1967 A.D. January 1967 saw the publication of the first issue of Language and language behavior abstracts, and so, perhaps, there will be no future need for a third edition of this bibliography.

The content of the bibliography represents, first of all, 746 entries from Professor Leopold’s original listing, and then the private bibliographies of Slobin, Ferguson, and Olmsted, all gathered over a number of years of research and writing on child language. In addition, we have benefited from advice and contributions from our colleagues, among them: Ursula Bellugi-Klima, Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, W. Kaper, David McNeill, Jaroslava Pačesová, Walburga von Raffler-Engel, and Tatiana Slama-Cazacu. All of them have given generously of their time and knowledge. Jennifer Badger and Carolyn Wardrip spent many hours in libraries, scanning journals (listed below¹) for more references. As we checked and cross-checked our files and the bibliographies of the publications we were reading, the rate of new entries began to slow, and, when it reached a trickle, it seemed time to stop collecting. Lisa Selkirk and Rachel Holmen did a back-breaking job of keypunching, sorting, and editing. And without Laura Gould’s endless patience and good-heartedness, and the additional aid of Robert Gaskins, we could never have instructed a computer to run a concordance program on the thousands of bibliography cards and produce an index. Michael Aronson, of Indiana University Press, has been the guide throughout. To all those who helped so much, mere thanks are not enough.

As mentioned above, the bibliography ends in June 1967. Already, then, it is out of date—but such are the ways of academia. The study of child language acquisition shows no sign of a recession. The Berkeley cross-cultural project (Slobin, 1967) is beginning to produce a new breed of anthropological psycho- and sociolinguists who are turning out dissertations on the acquisition of such languages as Luo (Blount, 1969), Samoan (Kernan, 1969), and Tzeltal (Stross, 1969), and similar cross- linguistic research is developing at Harvard and elsewhere. International congresses now bring together investigators of child language to share problems and observations in such far-flung cities as Kyoto, San Francisco, Washington, London, Florence, Prague, Bucharest, and Moscow. And psycholinguistics has sprung up as a graduate discipline in most of the major universities of this country and several others. Thus it will not be an easy task to keep up with the literature on child language acquisition in the seventies and thereafter.

In order to orient the reader to the rapid expansion of research on languages other than English, Appendix A was added just before going to press in March 1972. Recent and ongoing studies of the acquisition of some 41 languages are listed, along with addresses of current investigators. Appendix B presents a new and comprehensive bibliography of studies of Hungarian child language development, gathered in Budapest in 1971 by Brian MacWhinney.

For a review of the field at the beginning of the seventies, the reader is referred to two thorough and provocative works, written after the cutoff date of this bibliography: Braine (1971) and McNeill (1970). Foreign work has been summarized and interpreted by Slobin (1971a). Several recent symposia volumes contain important theoretical and empirical papers on linguistic ontogenesis: Hayes (1970), Huxley and Ingram (1971), Moore (in press), Morton (1970), Slobin (1971b). Two books of readings contain translations of earlier European studies along with classical and current American and foreign studies: Ferguson and Slobin (1972)² and Bar-Adon and Leopold (1971). Among important recent research monographs, the reader should note especially the work of Lois Bloom (1970) on the semantic and functional underpinnings of early syntactic development, and the work of Carol Chomsky (1969) on syntactic development in later childhood.

Professor Leopold has graciously consented to lend his name and part of his original work to this revised and augmented edition. I hope that this edition, like the first, will contribute to the further study of child language development by keeping students of the field in touch with what has been learned (and not learned) in the past.

Dan I. Slobin
Berkeley, California

References

Bar-Adon, A., & Leopold, W. F. Eds. (1971) Child language: A book of readings. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall.

Bloom, L. M. (1970) Language development: Form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press.

Blount, B. (1969) The acquisition of language by Luo children. Unpubl. doct. dissert., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley. [Working Paper No. 19, Language-Behavior Res. Lab., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley.]

Braine, M. D. S. (1971) The acquisition of language in infant and child. In The learning of language, ed. by C. E. Reed. New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 7-95.

Chomsky, C. (1969) The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press.

Ferguson, C. A., & Slobin, D. I., Eds. (1972) Studies of child language development. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Hayes, J. R., Ed. (1970) Cognition and the development of language. New York, Wiley.

Huxley, R., & Ingram, E., Eds. (1971) Language acquisition: Models and methods. London/New York, Academic Press.

Kernan, K. (1969) The acquisition of language by Samoan children. Unpubl. doct. dissert., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley. [Working Paper No. 21, Language-Behavior Res. Lab., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley.]

Leopold, W. F. (1952) Bibliography of child language. Evanston, 111., Northwestern Univer. Press.

McNeill, D. (1970) The acquisition of language: The study of developmental psycholinguistics. New York, Harper & Row.

Moore, T., Ed. (in press) Proceedings of the 1971 Buffalo Conference on Developmental Psycholinguistics. New York, Academic Press.

Morton, J., Ed. (1970) Biological and social factors in language learning. London, Logos Press.

Slobin, D. I., Ed. (1967) A field manual for the cross-cultural study of the acquisition of communicative competence. Berkeley, Calif., Univer. of Calif. ASUC Bookstore.

Slobin, D. I. (1971a) Developmental psycholinguistics. In A survey of linguistic science, ed. by W. O. Dingwall. College Park, Md., Univer. of Md. Linguistics Program.

Slobin, D. I., Ed. (1971b) The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium. New York, Academic Press.

Stross, B. (1969) The acquisition of language by Tzeltal children. Unpubl. doct. dissert., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley. [Working Paper No. 20, Language-Behavior Res. Lab., Univer. of Calif., Berkeley.]

Notes

1. Journals systematically scanned: Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, Bibliographie linguistique, Brain, Child Development, Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography, Doklady Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk RSFSR, International Journal of American Linguistics, Izvestiya Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk RSFSR, Journal de Psychologie normal et pathologique, Journal of abnormal and social Psychology, Journal of experimental child Psychology, Journal of personality and social Psychology, Journal of speech Disorders, Journal of speech and hearing Disorders, Journal of verbal Learning and verbal Behavior, Language, Language and Speech, Psychological Abstracts, Soviet Psychology and Psychiatry, Soviet Psychology, Voprosy psikhologii, Word, Zhurnal vysshey nervnoy deyatel’- nosti im. I. P. Pavlova.

2. The Ferguson and Slobin reader contains original translations of the following foreign works (as listed in the following bibliography): Bogoyavlenskiy (1957, pp. 261-266), Borgström (1954), El’konin (1958, pp. 34-61), Engel (1964b, 1965b), Guillaume (1927a, pp. 10-24; 1927b, pp. 216-229), Popova (1958), Rūķe-Draviņa (1959, 1965), Shvachkin (1948), Zakharova (1958), Zhurova (1963).