Effects of Discrimination, Grammatical Rules and Application of Rules on the Acquisition of Language Concepts in Children. Report No. 45.

The occurrence of the two allomorphs of the indefinite article in standard English ("a" before nouns or noun clauses beginning with consonant sounds and "an" before those beginning with vowel sounds) is a concept similar to those studied in the general concept formation paradigm. The acquisition of this grammatical concept was examined using 80 inner-city Negro fifth-graders. Results indicated that (1) learning the sound differences between instances and non-instances of the concept had no effect on subjects learning to effectively use instances of the concept orally; (2) learning to verbalize the grammatical rule which governs the concept did not facilitate concept formation; (3) training on the application of the verbalized rules strongly facilitated the acquisition of the ability to produce instances of the concept (p .001). The application training was superior to rule learning for low IQ but not for high IQ subjects. The ability to produce instances of the concept did not affect the ability to produce sentences containing instances of the concept. (Author/LH)