This article discusses a study designed to determine the order of acquisition of the two expressions "in front of" and "behind," using two featureless objects. (CFM)

Three investigations of preschool children's comprehension of "younger" and "older" are discussed. Results suggest children focus on height in their initial hypotheses about meanings of the terms, ignoring age or function cues. These and findings about acquisition of antonyms are discussed in terms of recent theorizing about lexical-meaning…

Children's understanding of the nature of polar terms and comparative terms between the polar opposites is discussed. (CHK)

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)

Experiments in eliciting true/false judgments from young children aged 3-5 used a "talking doll," a toy panda with a speaker installed. The procedure has been used in studies of language comprehension, communication skills, and free conversation experiments. (CHK)

Preschool children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either "before" or "after." Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences than for arbitrarily ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of "before" and "after" must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support.…

Based on a study of 50 children between the ages of 3;0 and 5;6, the reasons for the differential difficulty of various forms of "who,""why,""when," and "how" questions are postulated. (EJS)

Children in grades 1-3 were asked to retell and explain a series of riddles. Ability to recall riddles was not predictive of ability to explain them. Three cognitive factors seemed to determine level of riddle competence. Implications concern the relationship of riddle competence to reading ability and metalinguistic facility. (CHK)