Explores in three experiments development of three linguistic aspects of "more" in children's speech. Experiment 1 examined nature of early semantic content of "more;" Experiment 2, the child's differentiation of mass "more" from count "more"; and Experiment 3, the child's use of "more" as a…

This study investigated the role of semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms with 80 children (kindergarten and grades 1, 3, and 4). Idioms varied in the degree that the meanings of their parts contributed to their figurative meanings. Findings indicated age differences with younger children better understanding the…

The research study investigated the memory and metamemory abilities of four severely to profoundly deaf students with bilateral sensory-neural loss, between the ages of 9 and 20 years. Metamemory was investigated with four modified subtests identified as "story list,""study plan,""retrieval event," and "opposites-arbitrary." Encoding was…

Examined five possible rules that children might use to interpret the terms "big" and "little." Increasing consistency in rule usage appeared to be the most significant developmental progression for children between the ages of three and five with respect to these terms. (Author/RH)

Abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. It was concluded that increasing ability to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation…

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

This study examined initial preferences for verb interpretation by 15 5-year-old children with specific language impairment, 15 language-matched children, and 15 age-matched children. Children indicated preferred interpretations of novel verbs from videotapes of motion and change-of-state activity scenes. Findings suggested that children's verb…

This study investigated taxonomic clustering and use of frequency associations as features in the semantic memory of children (n=30 in grades two and six) with learning disabilities (LD). Results suggested that, when individual child-generated word lists (i.e., meaningful) are used, children with LD may not be impaired in their ability to utilize…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

This study examined the ability of 70 deaf and 58 hearing students at the college and middle school levels to discern and apply knowledge of printed word morphology, especially morpheme segmentation and semantic analysis. Deaf college students scored similarly to middle school hearing students. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Analysis of young children's comprehension of common idioms revealed a significant linear trend for children to make more literal responses with increasing age. Children did not find the story contexts helpful in interpreting the idioms. A range of comprehension scores was found among the individual idioms, but semantic transparency was not…

Research on the cognitive processes used in semantic priming has shown that the processing of a given stimulus is speeded by prior processing of a related stimulus as the result of automatic and/or effortful priming. To investigate the effect of age on semantic priming, two independent studies were conducted at Pomona College in California and at…

Two divergent views of linguistic ability in adulthood currently exist. One view maintains that verbal ability is preserved in old age, while the other view maintains that verbal ability declines, especially comprehension. To analyze the effects of semantic priming during sentence processing by 30 younger adults (mean age, 25 years) and 30 older…

This study examined effects of familiarity with a speech target on coarticulation magnitude in 30 young children and 10 adults. Children exhibited a greater effect of a following vowel on the preceding fricative than did adults. Nonmeaningful production items exhibited greater effects of the vowel on the preceding fricative than did meaningful…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…