The paper explores the role of parents and the nuclear family in optimal development of gifted preschool children. The family helps the child accomplish basic developmental tasks by adapting to the child's critical needs and interests in appropriate ways. While stimulating academic skills is important, affective education to aid the acquisition of…

The concern of this book is to examine written language and its relation to what is ordinarily understood by the term oral language, the process of its acquisition, and the place of written language in the process of mental development. The eight chapters (1) examine the relation of written language to oral language and trace the phonocentric…

By helping to produce a monthly school newsletter, senior-age trainable retarded students' cognitive, language and social skills are enhanced. (CL)

An analysis is provided of the effects of poverty on child development and later intellectual competence, in terms of goal seeking and problem solving, use of language, and patterns of social reciprocity. Implications are charted for public policy and for the conduct of early childhood education. (EH)

This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors…

A case study of the period of repetitive babbling in one Dutch infant is reported. Repetitive babbling is seen as a systematic and continuous process, during which the child is applying certain strategies in order to form concepts concerning the possibilities of his or her articulatory apparatus. Strategies identified are: (1) variation…

A study was undertaken to investigate which of ten constructions are available to children of various ages for expressing conditionality. A modified sentence completion test based on use of the ten constructions was designed, field-tested, and administered individually to 20 students in each of five grades: kindergarten and grades two, four, six,…

This paper discusses the role of language in early childhood education. The concept of Chomsky's generative grammar is explained briefly and the linguistic approaches of Piaget, Vygotsky and Whorf are compared with regard to the relations between cognitive structures and inner linguistic structures. An enigmatic discussion of language acquisition…

The two studies reported here examined processes involved in learning and remembering sentences. Experiment one identified processes in sentence acquisition, and experiment two analyzed memory for sentences one week after initial learning. Subjects for the experiments were students in a college educational psychology class. The experiments…

In this paper two questions are raised: (1) Is there any meaning to current research? (2) Is meaning important to the language acquisition process? It is necessary to explore the nature of research in general to evaluate what kind of research we are doing. This leads us to consider next the content of research on human learning and on the…

An explanation of the child's mind and his language, stated in terms of the nature of the learner, is presented in this book. The authors ask teachers to think about the competence of the child and try to discover what he must know to be able to read. They ask teachers to examine the nature of the learner--what he knows that enables him to learn…

This panel discussion seeks to determine the role of babbling and of nonlinguistic behavior in language acquisition. A central question is whether there is a continuity between babbling and speech. The paper presents the views that: the infant's ability to assimilate and adapt to his environment antedates the maturation of his visual and auditory…

Analysis of the questions asked by normal children suggests that there are cognitive stages of question development. Samples of spontaneous questions asked by normal children and linguistically deviant children were compared in this study in order to determine if linguistically deviant (aphasic) children suffer primarily from a syntactic…

In this book Piaget considers the way children learn about the world. He addresses such questions as the following: How does a child learn to perceive the world around him? How, for example, does he learn that by grasping an object, he can pull it towards him, or that a ball of clay, flattened, is no smaller than it was before? How does he learn…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the view that the language a person speaks influences his perception of the world. This hypothesis is frequently misunderstood to be a question of the influence of language on culture, when in reality it emphasizes the influence of language on the cognition of its speakers. This distinction between culture…