The study of language acquisition in children has become increasingly important in recent years. From the normative studies of the 1930s (McCarthy, 1954), we have age related milestones for the language development of children. From the more recent psycholinguistic research based on transforma tional grammar (Brown and Bellugi, 1964; Chomsky, 1957; 1965; Meny?k, 1969) we know further that a child's language is not acquired through a simple associational learning process but rather with the grasp of a complex set of rules underlying the structure of language. The psycholinguistic research is beginning to demonstrate that are definite relationships between linguistic and cognitive universals (Slobin, 1971). That is, when describing child language, researchers suggest thet are relationships between psychological and linguistic processes that occur from the inception of an idea to its actual phonological manifestation and from the time the child begins to utter his first word until he becomes an adult user of the language. The best indication of these universals is that children all over the world learn language according to a set of underlying principles that appear to be the same. There appears to be a series of processes that all children progress through in acquiring language. The first stage in language acquisiton is that of one word speech. This stage occurs somewhere between 8 and 17 months. One word speech is described as holophrastic or rich in (McNeill, 1966). That is, a single word may mean a complex set of ideas. Speech at this stage is also predicative in that the child generally lacks verbs. However, he seems to be saying something about the world. For instance, if the child says he may mean I want milk, or there is a glass of milk sitting on the table, or give me a glass of milk. Along with this, at the one word stage, it is important to note that any description of a child's language at this point must be based upon how the observer interprets the situation and the utter ances. The child at this stage cannot use his speech to elaborate or to get his meaning across at all times. Thus as Bloom (1970) has pointed out, it is important to include the context of the utterance in an attempt to make the meaning of that utterance clearer. Brown (1973) described child language in terms of five stages through which a child progresses. He uses a range of the Mean Length of Utteran ce which increases with age to characterize each stage. Thus instead of dividing each stage up in terms of the number of words per stage, Mean Length of
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