Hungarian Child Language Research: 1970-1990 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This little booklet is a mainly descriptive summary of child language research done in Hungary during the last two decades. A two decades limit was chosen for the survey due to two reasons. First, Hungarian child language research has become more active during this period. Second, research up to this point is covered by the special chapter by MacWhinney in Slobin's new edition of Leopold's Bibliography of Child Language. The authors tried to cover all research within Hungary but do not have the ambition to describe all the studies done on Hungarian outside Hungary as well. Beside giving a concise summary of the researches, we tried to give sufficient bibliographic and logistic information for the user to get in touch with the original material and/or the researchers themselves. Two reference lists are given at the end of the booklet. The Bibliography covers the material on Hungarian. Out of the references written in Hungarian, only the most important ones are mentioned, while we tried to include all publications in a foreign language done by Hungarians on Hungarian. The Reference Notes section lists the most important other bibliographical entries mentioned in the text. The reader has to keep in mind some background information on the setting of child language research in Hungary. 'Serious research' in the Western sense is done by linguists and psychologists in academic contexts. However, in Hungary there is a constant emphasis on the importance of mother tongue education at all levels. Related to this fact, there is a rich educational literature on language programs -in nursery schools, formal mother tongue education in the schools, early second language acquisition, issues of proper usage, delayed development and the like. Most of this literature has been ignored here since although interesting it lacks solid scientific goals. It mainly discusses educational programs, priorities and techniques. The interested reader with sufficient knowledge of Hungarian can find them in journals like ovodai Nevelés (Nursery School Education), Magyar Nyelvőr (Proper Hungarian), Gyógypedagógiai Szemle (Review of Special Education) and the like. Our survey has no ambitions to present a systematic outline of the acquisition of Hungarian; it is merely an overview of the existing studies.