The study suggests that developing greater facility in linguistic skills may well produce greater cognitive differentiation and enhance the process of objectification. (Author)

This study examined the effects of certain contextual linguistic variables on the logical performance of subjects in grades 4, 6, and 12 of selected British Columbia schools as well as some theoretical problems underlying assessment of the development of logical abilities. The task consisted of 27 syllogistic problems based upon the information…

Interactions between metaphor comprehension and level of operational thought were examined to determine what advantages individuals at the formal operational level had in natural language tasks such as the understanding of figurative language. After 30 undergraduate students were classified as either late concrete, early formal, or late formal…

The hypothesized relationship between an individual's age, educational background, and ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity was investigated in this study. The 90 subjects included ten students in each of grades two, four, six, eight, and ten, as well as ten college undergraduates, ten graduate students, ten high school graduates,…

This paper attempts to specify the ways in which bilingualism might affect cognitive functioning. Two general ways, the "linguistic" and the "non-linguistic," are distinguished. Linguistic explanations explain the effects of bilingualism on cognition as a direct result of the fact that the bilingual has access to two verbal…

The achievement of bilingualism appears to have positive consequences for the bilingual child, enhancing universal aspects of cognitive functioning available to all normal children. However, little is yet known about the interaction between educational treatment and the input factors the bilingual child brings to the situation. Focusing on the…

This paper examines whether language development can be understood epigenetically in the same manner and based on the same principles with which Piaget has analyzed intellectual-cognitive development generally. The study is subdivided into four parts: (1) some principles in Piaget's system (the epigenetic principle, the genetic circle, and the…

This research studied the effects of abstract-reasoning ability, degree of bidialectism, and grade level on listening comprehension tasks presented in both Standard English and Black English and on oral reading and oral-reading comprehension tasks presented in Standard English, Black English standard orthography, and Black English nonstandard…

The range of meanings of "big" and "little" that mothers and their three children under age two expressed in relatively natural communication situations was studied. Longitudinal data from transcripts of conversations of middle-class mothers and their children were analyzed along with diary records kept by parents of their children's use of size…

In an experiment designed to determine their use of relational terms, 168 Navajo children aged 5 to adult attempted three relational tasks regarding the concepts of upward, downward, and equality comparison in the areas of mass, number, and continuous quantity. All subjects used the relational terms of "more", "less", and…