To investigate young children's understanding of metaphorical language, 90 chidren from preschool to third grade were read stories ending with metaphorical sentences of varying degrees of difficulty--sentences representing more or less predictable story outcomes and differing in the complexity and explicitness of their figures of speech. After…

As the first title in the new series, "New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches", this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

Investigates the development of awareness of conversational principles in preschool, first-, and third-grade children by presenting them with short stories ending with a verbal statement by a story character. Results suggest that children's understanding of conversational principles improves considerably between preschool and first grade.…

A variety of sources, including writing samples and videotapes of writing sessions, were examined to determine what speech events underlie the written compositions of students from fourth through twelfth grades. Findings revealed a correlation between different levels of writing competency and four types of speech events: encoding, conversation,…