TS school starters had enhanced receptive and expressive language on standardised assessment (CELF-P) and enhanced rhyme judgements, spoonerisms, and lexical decision, indicating enhanced phonological skills and word representations. There was marginal but consistent advantage across lexico-semantic tasks. On executive tasks, speeded naming of…

Reinterprets Jeannie R. Aschkenasy and Richard D. Odom's findings (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology; v34 n3 Dec 1982) on perceptual and cognitive development. The increasing dimensionalization of stimulus relations rather than the increasing detectability or influence of stimulus differences is argued. (BJD)

This paper analytically reviews the literature on cognitive development, particularly as it relates to the acquisition of language. Of primary concern are the basic cognitive processes of perceptual groupings, concepts and relations, and memory. Discussed are the acquisition of language, some aspects of the nature of language and language…

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

The work described in this report is aimed at understanding the role of cognitive development, especially perceptual development, in the reading process and its acquisition. The papers included describe: (1) a theory of perceptual learning, (2) an investigation of the perception of morphological information, (3) the role of categorical semantic…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…

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 idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the development of the use and understanding of locative and temporal prepositions in 94 children aged from 18 months to 8 years. The research was carried out as part of the Project "Language Development in Pre-School Children," directed by Gordon Wells, at the University of…

A previous study found that middle-class Hebrew-English bilingual children were characterized by distinctive perceptual strategies and more advanced processing in certain verbal tasks, as compared to similar monolinguals. The present study tested whether similar strategies and response patterns will appear when the children involved are from…