The nature and development of discourse topic skills in preschool children are examined and illustrated by observations of very young children. Possible social and cognitive components are explored with implications for language-disordered populations. (CL)

Pretend play is often undervalued and ignored. This videotape and accompanying booklet highlight how the dramatic scenarios, microworlds, storytelling, and block building of pretend play provide young children the opportunity to develop skills for a lifetime of intellectual, social, emotional, and creative development. The booklet describes the…

The research project is being supported by a grant from the Bureau of Research, U.S. Office of Education (OEC 6-10-235)

A nonverbal assessment procedure was designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework with six autistic children, five echolalic and one nonverbal, ranging in age from 4.8 to 15.2. All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI, and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and…

A nonverbal assessment procedure designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework was administered to six autistic children, (4.8 to 15.2 years old). All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and concrete operations. (Author)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)

Children aged 5, 7, and 9 were tested on two different tasks to assess their understanding of sentences containing the connectives "when,""as soon as,""before,""after,""if,""if not,""unless," and "unless not." (Author/SB)

Two predictions based on H. Clark's and E. Clark's hypotheses of the acquisition of word meanings were tested: (1) when learning words which have both spatial and temporal meanings, children will understand the spatial meanings first, and (2) children understand the positive member of an antonym word pair before they understand the negative…

Presents a hybrid ACT-R model that shows U-shaped learning of the English past tense without direct feedback, changes in vocabulary, or unrealistically high rates of regular verbs. Illustrates that the model can learn the default rule, even if regular forms are infrequent. Shows that the model can explore the question of why there is a distinction…

Used a framework-isolating analysis of knowledge and control of processing components to investigate preschoolers' acquisition of cardinality. Found that cardinality emerges gradually in children between ages three and five. Also, tasks that increase the processing burden of a basic counting problem by adding demands for either analysis or control…

Two experiments with monolingual German-speaking 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. Correct answers emerged with mastery of the false-belief task. It was concluded that the observed gap constrains de Villiers's linguistic…

Four word-learning studies exposed 2-year olds to novel verbs and nouns. Found that knowledge of what action or object was impending was not necessary for learning the words; children learned a novel verb for an intentional but not an accidental action; and children learned a novel noun for an object being sought, but not ones rejected while…

This study investigated the role of semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms with 80 children (kindergarten and grades 1, 3, and 4). Idioms varied in the degree that the meanings of their parts contributed to their figurative meanings. Findings indicated age differences with younger children better understanding the…

This study utilized the head-turn preference procedure in four experiments to determine whether 1-year-old infants could extract and remember information from auditory strings produced by miniature artificial grammar. Findings indicated that subjects generalized to the new structure by discriminating new grammatical strings from ungrammatical ones…