If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

According to some views of cognitive growth, the development of working memory capacity can account for increases in the complexity of cognition. It has been difficult to ascertain, though, that there actually is developmental growth in capacity that cannot be attributed to other developing factors. Here we assess the role of item familiarity. We…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

The internal use of language during problem solving is considered to play a key role in executive functioning. This role provides a means for self-reflection and self-questioning during the formation of rules and plans and a capacity to control and monitor behavior during problem-solving activity. Given that increasingly sophisticated language is…

Research is reported showing that children are lexically conservative in the domain of learning argument omissibility. Two studies (one observational case study, one experimental) show a relationship between the argument frames used in input and those used by child subjects. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/LB)

Phenomena are examined to support the conception that cognitive structures continue to reflect the numerous ways of apprehending the world that blend to some degree into each other. (AMH)

Discusses the role of reading in bilingual education and proposes that teachers in bilingual classrooms be grounded in cognitive development theory and practices. Concludes that once students have mastered English communication skills they will be able to transfer their thinking abilities into the second language without major difficulty. (FL)

A study examined the effects of differing degrees of bilingualism (English monolingual, English-French balanced bilingual, Bengali-English partial bilingual) on nonverbal problem-solving abilities of 71 grade-three children. The groups were compared on control of attention and analysis of knowledge. Results indicate the balanced bilinguals…

This paper discusses the relationship between language development and cognitive development in children within the framework of a French-English bilingual school situation. Initially the document covers the language development of the infant learning English; the author then describes specific problems of educating the English-speaking child with…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…