Examined three-year-old children's ability to generalize novel words to new instances. Suggested that children's similarity judgments and feature selection in name generalization are guided by nonstrategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information. Proposed that these findings may explain the extraordinary…

Linguistic and cognitive competencies of preschoolers were revealed by interviewing them about routine activities. It was found that freeing preschoolers' speech from constraints inherent in talking about the immediate context results in their demonstrating control over a variety of language-related skills that are generally assumed to be beyond…

Teachers working with a language experience approach to reading may use word-sorting activities as a means of exploring the letter/sound concepts and semantic concepts that children are forming. Using words that are already in a child's reading vocabulary, words that the child has made into sight vocabulary, and words that the child has requested…