Differential effects of parental deafness and early exposure to manual communication were not observed in the cognitive and communication performance of the 38 experimental subjects. Furthermore, the Delayed sign language group performed significantly better than the early American Sign Language group on tests of speech perception and speech…

Recognizes and praises the research of Margaret Donaldson for what it reveals about children's thinking and highlights three central contributions of her work to the understanding of children's language learning. (HOD)

Two experiments compare listening and reading comprehension of sentences which follow Minimum Distance Principle and investiagte effect of composition of an experimental presentation list on performance. Implications for assessment of development of language competence are discussed. (Author/HS)

Describes a study showing that mentally retarded children and mentally normal children do not differ fundamentally in cognitive development within the framework of a particular cognitive training. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Children at three age levels were administered Schutz and Keislar's word-span task using nouns, verbs and functors as stimuli. (Author/RM)

The article highlights some of the areas of ongoing research that are crucial to achieving smooth and productive cognitive and linguistic development for the young hearing impaired child. (Author)

Language is a child's major tool for learning about the world. This book presents a naturalistic case study of one child's use of language from two-and-a-half to five years, drawing on systemic functional theory to argue that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process and offering a new description and interpretation of linguistic…

Japanese and American children participated in a free word association experiment. Results indicated that culture was influential in the formation of language. (ST)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Analyzes the interrelationship of concepts, cognitive patterns, and linguistic patterns with the several operations of the reading act as these relate to the environmental background of the students and challenges researchers and teachers to consider reading as an interrelated rather than as a segmented skill process. Bibliography. (MD)

Summarizes the results of extensive psychoeducational evaluation on 40 hearing impaired preschool children ages 2.5 to 3.7. Background data are presented on age of identification of hearing loss, employment patterns of parents, additional handicapping conditions, etiology, and degree and type of hearing loss sustained. (Author)

Some of the findings of a longitudinal study of three infants between their 11th and 22nd months to document development of linguistic expression of the agent concept indicated that first vocalizations were inconsistently associated with nonverbal agentive behaviors and later mature utterances coded agent-action-recipient events. (MC)

Young children found it difficult to verify negative statements, but found affirmative statements, affirmative questions, and negative questions equally easy to deal with. It is proposed that children acquire the answering system earlier than the verification system, and use answering to verify statements before acquiring the verification system.…

Provides evidence indicating a strong connection between a high level of ambient household noise and intellectual deficits at stages of infant development. Observers rated noise level from all household sources (stereos, appliances, etc.). Delays were found in sensorimotor development with high levels of noise. (Author/JN)