This study attempted to determine: (1) whether lower-order units (agent or agent-action) within the agent-action-recipient relationship exist in any functional way in the 1-word infant's comprehension of speech; and (2) whether the use of repetition and/or reduced length (common modifications in adult-to-infant speech) used to focus on these…

Presents a study which assessed preschool children's understanding of "front,""back," and "side" through a variety of tasks. A developmental sequence is defined. (ED)

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)

"More" and "less" were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, "occurence" and "quantity", which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. (SBT)

In an attempt to clarify the role of nonlinguistic preferences in children's responses to the words more and less, children 3-4 years of age were administered three tasks. (Author/SB)

To determine the effects of instruction in general semantics on the critical thinking of secondary students, 104 tenth- and eleventh-grade students in control and experimental groups completed the "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" test before and after the 12-week teaching period, in which two teachers spent 1 hour per week in the…

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)

An approach to intelligence which emphasizes domain-specific constraints on knowledge structures is compared to information processing approaches. The evaluation of any cognitive ability as being intelligent crucially depends on prior specification of the formal constraints on the domains of knowledge from which that ability originates. (Author/RD)

This study investigated preschool children's understanding of the words "know" and "guess." Subjects for the study were 48 male and female preschool children ranging in age from 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children were divided into three age groups representing one year intervals. The task for the study involved a "guessing" game in which a colored…

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,…

The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory is the subject of this research report. An underlying proposition is that in order for a child to effectively understand and remember linguistic or nonlinguistic information, he must actively embellish the given stimulus material with his own implicit knowledge. In the experiment…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

The recent experimental literature on the acquisition of English antonyms is reviewed, with special reference to the position of Eve Clark and the particular ontogenetic assumptions her position entails. The assumptions examined are: (1) in a hierarchically organized lexical domain, the order of acquisition appears to be from the top of the…