Forty-five children drawn equally from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were administered a nonverbal imitation task, a production task, a comprehension task, and a verbal imitation task. The results of the four tasks support the Temporal Complexity Hypothesis, which states that the components of temporality--order among events (O),…

Narrative observations were made of remedial interchanges occurring among school children (K-4) in open classrooms. Transcripts of interchanges were typed move by move and coded according to a hierarchical coding scheme (remedy, defiance, no response, relief, ending, and ambiguous). The interchanges of the kindergarteners and first graders were…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

Three studies were conducted with three groups of eighteen autistic children (3-11 years old) matched by age and IQ to developmental aphasic Ss to examine the nature of the cognitive deficit underlying autism. Two experiments were concerned with language comprehension using real and anomalous sentences, while the third investigation was an…

This study examined the social labels which are first used by infants, social differentiation on the basis of labeling behavior, and overgeneralization of social labels. Subjects were 81 infants from 9 to 36 months of age. The 9- to 24-month-olds were shown slides of themselves, their mothers, their fathers, and unfamiliar children, babies, and…

Three research studies were performed to assess patterns of memory organization with respect to complementary and similarity dimensions, referring to associations based on functional relatedness and grammatical relatedness, respectively. The first study failed to replicate the results of a study by Denney and Ziobrowski (1972), indicating that…

Studied were some cognitive aspects of the language development of a 2-year-old Puerto Rican boy who had been on the U.S. mainland 1 month. A Neo-Piagetian approach (developed by K. Witz and J. Easley) was used to study: language behavior as being embedded in more complex, unified systems; productivity of different structures and language…

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

This handbook for teachers contains language lessons for young children. Through sequencing and feedback, the program uses a direct method of teaching and learning standard English. It is an expository approach, in which progress is based on performance, rather than on the knowledge of rules. Each unit is organized so that language development and…

This is a followup study of second and third grade children who experienced differential treatment during their kindergarten year. A total of 72 disadvantaged black children comprised the sample which was divided into three groups. Group A received a special sequential Learning to Learn Program. Group B participated in a traditional kindergarten…

The purpose of this newsletter is to report current activities concerning the study of child language. Each issue will offer reports of ongoing research, announcements of upcoming meetings and conferences and reports on those recently held, and news of recent publications concerning language acquisition. This issue's research report is "Child…

Lexical development in mentally retarded and normal children was indexed using the Free Word Association Task. Approximately 170 institutionalized and noninstitutionalized retarded children and 59 normal children were administered the 40-word stimulus list consisting mainly of adjectives and nouns. Responses were categorized according to apparent…

Language acquisition and development by the child is explored and related to other areas of maturation and the environment. The nine chapters of the book are: I. Historical Perspective (discusses the student's attitude toward language, the effects of his attitude, factors that might hamper the study of language, and, briefly, various theories of…

This article discusses children's phonological limitations, including perceptual difficulties and productive difficulties. (NCR)

Discusses the relationship of cognitive development or thinking skills to language development and beginning reading. (MKM)