Questioning others is one of the most powerful methods that children use to learn about the world. How does questioning develop? How is it socialized? And how can questioning be leveraged to support learning and education? In this volume, some of the world's leading experts are brought together to explore critical issues in the development of…

Two experiments using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm examined infants' ability to form and retrieve a basic-level category. Results indicated that infants categorized when tested immediately and after a five-minute delay. (PCB)

Changes in children's categorization behavior between 15 and 21 months of age and the relation of these changes to developments in language, object permanence, and means-end understanding are reported. (PCB)

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

This study evaluated the accuracy of automated methods of grammatical categorization ("tagging") of transcribed conversational language samples from 30 normally developing children. On a word-by-word basis, automated accuracy levels averaged 95.1%; accuracy of tagging whole utterances averaged 77.7%. Results suggest that further improvement of…

The taxonomy developed by J. Klecan-Aker et al. to investigate the use of various speech acts in response to questions during a structured picture-description task was evaluated. Results indicated that the taxonomy was sufficient to handle the responses of a group of 12 language-impaired children, aged 7-11. (JDD)

This review of research discusses how children with autism may acquire equivalence classes after learning to supply a common oral name to each stimulus in a potential class. A proposed methodology for researching referent naming and class formation, analysis of stimulus classes, and generalization is offered. (CR)

Verbal and figurative classification tasks were presented to 30 blind and 30 sighted children (ages 6 to 11). Although younger blind children were significantly less efficient on tasks, older ones reached or were close to the level of their sighted peers. Analysis illustrates how the blind children adjusted their conceptual knowledge to their…

A cluster analytic study was conducted to derive behaviorally homogeneous subtypes of pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) based on a range of behavioral symptoms that characterize autism. Analysis of data on 34 children with PDD, 27 of whom met criteria for autism, indicated 4 distinct groups differing on independent measures of social,…

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

The phonemic awareness of 100 children in the second semester of kindergarten was evaluated through analysis of their invented spelling patterns. A taxonomy of 10 invented spelling patterns and 21 response types was developed. A developmental ordering of spelling patterns is proposed and relationships among phonological awareness, spelling, and…

Four students (ages seven to nine) with moderate mental retardation were successfully taught to name photographs of foods using a progressive time delay procedure. Presentation of the supermarket grocery department as part of the discriminative stimulus was effective in increasing the percentage of correct responding. Some generalization occurred…

Systems for classifying speakers' communicative intents are typically limited in scope, in applicability across the full developmental range of language abilities and disabilities, and in their theoretical foundations. Criteria for an adequate system for analyzing communicative intents are discussed, and a system is proposed which meets those…