Reports on research carried out in the Netherlands using visual feedback showing that training in perception of intonation resulted in statistically significant improvement in production of English intonation patterns. (Author/BK)

Results of an experiment using perception and discrimination learning tests showed that, in children, perception is affected by labels, perceptual learning, and selective attention. These effects are determined developmentally. As age increases, the effects of verbal clues decrease and those of perceptual clues increase. (PMJ)

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…

Exploration of the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8 to 14 and 14 to 20 months; established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months; and showed a profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word…

A cross-cultural study examined preschoolers' knowledge of elementary components of the writing system. Subjects were 41 Chinese and 44 American preschool students between the ages of 2 and 4. The students were presented with sets of cards depicting familiar objects, capitalized English letters, and Chinese characters and were asked to turn each…

The cognitive aspect of second language learning, specifically by immersion method, is discussed from a biological perspective. The approach taken is that of "connectionism," a recently-developed theoretical and experimental approach to human cognition. It is argued that while general cognitive functioning is unaffected by language immersion,…

Studies investigating the functioning of persons who have cerebral lesions and evidence from the study of commisurotomized and normal subjects are reviewed. A study of recognition of pictorial stimuli by right-handed male children is also discussed. Studies about cerebral lesions and associated deficits have yielded information about the…

A comparison of frequency and directionality of 13 Navajo and 7 Caucasian preschool children's oral-linguistic and nonoral-visual behaviors in an urban classroom and playground revealed Navajo children to be far less oral-linguistic, considerably less oral-nonlinguistic, and strikingly more nonoral-visual than the Caucasian children. (NEC)

Nonverbal context is important in the language acquisition process. The present study compares different amounts and ordering of pictorial context with respect to their effect on learning word-referent relations in a second language. Twenty-five monolingual English-speaking high school students were shown twenty Spanish sentences and pictures of…