BASED ON EXPERIMENTATION EXAMINING THE THINKING CAPACITIES OF DEAF CHILDREN, THIS PAPER REPORTS FINDINGS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP OF ABILITY TO LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE. PERFORMANCE OF DEAF CHILDREN ON TASKS INVOLVING CONCEPT FORMATION AND LOGICAL THINKING WAS FOUND TO BE COMPARABLE TO THAT OF MATCHED HEARING SUBJECTS WHEN VERBALIZATION WAS NOT…

Vygotsky's views on how language is instrumental in bringing about advanced forms of intellectual functioning offer a researchable framework from which to study this development. Developmentalists in psychology and linguistics have focused for too long on continuities rather than on the process of change in mental growth. The study of the…

The comprehension of big, little, and same number and the production of relational terminology was assessed in 168 preschool children. (Author/BD)

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO DISCUSS THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOME LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS ARE, IN FACT, THE INEVITABLE RESULT OF UNIVERSAL MENTAL CAPACITIES. ONE SUCH UNIVERSAL IS SUGGESTED, AND THE ENTIRE QUESTION IS CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF CERTAIN THEORIES OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT--MAINLY PIAGET'S, AND SECONDARILY BRUNER'S AND VYGOTSKY'S.…

This study was designed to determine whether infants could perceive action role reversals when the direction of action is ruled out as a cue; whether infants consider inanimate, nonpotent objects to be unlikely agents; and whether both these discriminations could be reliably reflected in the heart rate response. (Author/SB)

Five conference reports that originally appeared as monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development concern cognition in young children. Included in a section on thought are articles on Piaget and his theories, computer simulation on human thinking, and an information processing theory of intellectual development. The development of…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Infants learn their language by first determining, independent of language, the meaning which a speaker intends to convey to them, and by then working out the relationship between the meaning and the expression they heard. (Author)

Research findings concerned with the relationship between the child's oral language behavior and learning to read are described. A cognitive-biological approach to the child's perceptual system development is taken, and data are presented to support both the developmental point of view of language development and the point of view that the child…

Through the meaningful interpretation of sensory data and a background in language experiences, an individual can build more effective knowledge structures. With more effective knowledge structures, one can react more discriminatingly to the written and printed word. Sound knowledge structures involve not only the ability to organize and…

The author reviews findings in perception, cognition, psycholinguistics, and motivation, concentrating on the development of these processes in the nonreading and beginning reading child rather than in the mature processes of a skilled reader. She offers the following conclusions: (1) Research in perception suggests that there are developmental…

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)