Children of the Salt River (Language Science Monographs No. 16)

From the introduction: "Our findings suggest that the English of Pima children does not continue to develop at the same rate as that of their Maryland suburban peers after the age of ten, and that the gap tends to widen with each succeeding year thereafter. Within the Chomskyan linguistic framework on eis expected to assume that such differences are a matter of performance. We reject, then, any inherent difference in basic language ability, basic intelligence, or basic linguistic competence ofr Pima children. However, what happens to them as the educational and developmental process unfolds produces a notably lower performance in language. The subject matter of this book is the nature of language acquisition by Pima children, in particular as it compares with that of a randomly selected suburban poulation of Maryland children."