Tells how children's spelling strategies offer a glimpse of their knowledge about words; describes a study indicating that children's knowledge about words develops sequentially and systematically over an extended period of time. Discusses implications of the study for spelling instruction. (GT)

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system ("bu,"…

A study was undertaken to investigate which of ten constructions are available to children of various ages for expressing conditionality. A modified sentence completion test based on use of the ten constructions was designed, field-tested, and administered individually to 20 students in each of five grades: kindergarten and grades two, four, six,…

In one experiment, children from 5 to 10 years of age played with puppets and responded to questions concerning the acquisition of one particular linguistic structure by children; in another series of experiments, both children and adults responded to questions regarding nonsense words in differentiating contexts--the focus of the discussion…

Previous research has shown a similar starting time for early combinations of words and play actions in children and has suggested that similar cognitive processes underlie the transition to combining activities in language, symbolic play, and manipulative play. A study was undertaken to investigate combining activities in these three domains and…

The purposes of this study were: (1) to determine whether there is a developmental sequence in the child's acquisition of certain metalinguistic abilities; and (2) to determine whether the child's acquisition of these metalinguistic abilities is related to Piagetian operations. The measure of metalinguistic ability on which this study focused was…

Indicates that 18- to 20-month-old infants can detect the correspondence between auditorially and visually perceived speech; that is, they manifest some of the components related to lip-reading phenomena in adults. This demonstration of the bimodal perception of speech in infancy has important implications for social, cognitive, and linguistic…

Assumptions of strong, causal relations between cognition, language, and affection are often made in general and in bilingualism in particular. This paper presents first a set of hypotheses concerning the relation between affection and language in bilingualism. One subset is concerned with language learning, language maintenance, and mental health…

From about age four to age eleven, a child's concept of "word" develops from a lack of conceptual differentiation about things and events to an awareness of words as meaningful elements in themselves. Piaget's theory of cognitive development offers a perspective from which this phenomenon can be evaluated. The preoperational and concrete…

Children aged three to five were the subjects of two studies of the development of ability to classify diverse objects into superordinate categories. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to designate two of three pictorially represented objects as representative of a given category. The second experiment required subjects to choose from a…

Discusses (1) the new perspective on children's capabilities provided by focus on discourse; (2) conversation with an older member of the culture as a context for development; (3) links between linguistic and cognitive development; and (4) children as a member of a culture from infancy onward. Developmental changes and problems in discourse study…

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

An experiment on children aged 2 to 7 led to a critical evaluation of Piaget's implicit contention that young children use determiners anaphorically. It is suggested that the importance of young children's processing procedures on the linguistic environment has been underestimated in Piaget's interactive epistemology. (CHK)

A discussion of the biological and developmental issues in early second language learning first looks at psycholinguistic research on brain growth patterns and the relationship of first and second language learning. Focus is on three phenomena observed in the self-organization of living systems: selection of input data; organization of specialized…

This volume deals with various aspects of the relationship between linguistic ability and general cognitive development. It presents original, up-to-date research for child psychologists, linguists, psycholinguists, scholars, teachers, and students interested in this field and interprets the findings in the context of contemporary linguistic…