Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

Data on the conservation of discontinuous quantity are analyzed according to two different criteria: judgment only and judgment plus explanation. The results are discussed in terms of Piagetian theory and particularly of the assumption that language development is a consequence, and not a cause, of cognitive development. (Author/KC)

A review of the literature and research studies supports the psycholinguistic position regarding the acquisition of reading skills in that a positive correlation exists between the act of reading to children and their eventual reading achievements. (JN)

Tells how children's spelling strategies offer a glimpse of their knowledge about words; describes a study indicating that children's knowledge about words develops sequentially and systematically over an extended period of time. Discusses implications of the study for spelling instruction. (GT)

A cross-sectional study of language comprehension in relation to cognitive functioning in 48 10-to 21-month-old children, four at each month of age, revealed significant correlations between comprehension and five sensorimotor subscales. (Author/PHR)

Describes a study designed to clarify the relationships among young children's age, reasoning ability, ability to add regular and irregular plurals to real and nonsense count nouns and testing methods. Discusses age as a factor employed to indicate how the use of plurals changes over time. (MES)

The developmental nature of the reflective concept of "word" in young children was investigated and the degree to which these developmental aspects of metalinguistic awareness correspond to levels of cognitive development as described by Piaget was studied. (HOD)

The specialized regions of the brain which control mental activity and language development are discussed in this article. (Author/SA)

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)

Reports on several syntactic studies and suggests that switches by mode in writing strategy may be developmentally beneficial. (DD)

Emphasizes the oral aspect of language and the writing skills children gain from hearing literature read aloud. (SB)

Examined parental speech data demonstrating that linguistic input to children does not contain sufficient information to support unaided learning of the pronoun "one." Examined 18-month-olds' interpretation of sentences with a "one" substitution. Found that 18-month-olds have command of the syntax of "one." Because…

Language abilities in two twin pairs, in which one twin suffered perinatal left hemisphere brain injury, were studied from the age of 23-30 months to 41-46 months. Twins performed similarly on tests of mental development, picture vocabulary, and receptive language, but brain-injured twins' scores were lower than controls' on expressive language.…

Discusses the concepts of linguistic awareness and metalinguistic consciousness and their development in individuals, and shows how making a distinction between the two concepts can be useful to linguists, particularly in the areas of first and second language learning. (CFM)

In a study of event knowledge, 13 2-year-olds were observed interacting with their mothers over a 5-month period. Results indicated that children's increasing event knowledge facilitated their language development (e.g., lexical type use, action verb use) and their lexical token use. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/LB)