ABSTRACT
A GROUP of us at Harvard are engaged in a longitudinal study of the development of grammar in three preschool children. One of the children, Eve, is the daughter of a graduate student, Adam is the son of a minister who lives in Boston, and Sarah is the daughter of a man who works as a clerk in Somerville. Eve’s and Adam’s parents have college educations; Sarah’s parents have high school degrees. The principal data of the study are transcriptions of the spontaneous speech of the child and his mother (occasionally also the father) in conversation at home. For each child we have at least two hours of speech for every month that he has been studied; sometimes as much as six hours. Sarah’s records are entirely transcribed in a phonetic notation that includes stress and intonation. The other children’s records are not in phonetic notation except at a few points where some particular hypothesis made the notation necessary.
