Disagrees with recommendations made by developmental spelling researchers who advocate radical change in spelling instruction. Discusses flaws in developmental spelling research and questions researchers' advice to classroom teachers. (DR)

Inferential questions were found to elicit longer responses than factual questions, reflecting complexity and the use of higher cognitive processes. (MKM)

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

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

Seven key generalizations based on research findings from the study of children's language offer specific implications for classroom instruction and for instructional policy formulation and decision making. (Author/MLF)

Discusses the results of a study designed to determine the metalinguistic awareness of 45 preschool children (15 elementary school children were included to determine the effect of school attendance). The children wre given 3 "metalinguistic" tasks: judging the acceptability of sentences, dividing words, and judging the coherence of…

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,…

Japanese elementary school children were administered a series of trials in a paired-associate learning paradigm. It was shown that younger children learn foreign words faster than older children. (JB)

Examines cohesive ties that children and adults use during verbal explanations to resolve incongruent discourse information. Identifies age-related changes in children's use of adversatives and causal connectives. Finds less use of personal referents and demonstratives among preschoolers, and no decreased use of additives and temporal connectives…

From about age four to age eleven, a child's concept of "word" develops from a lack of conceptual differentiation about things and events to an awareness of words as meaningful elements in themselves. Piaget's theory of cognitive development offers a perspective from which this phenomenon can be evaluated. The preoperational and concrete…

The properties of written, textual language with which children deal in school can be distinguished from those of oral language by examining the manner in which interpersonal and logical functions are stressed and by assessing the degree to which interpretation is confined by meaning explicitly stated in textual matter. The developmental process…

A discussion of the biological and developmental issues in early second language learning first looks at psycholinguistic research on brain growth patterns and the relationship of first and second language learning. Focus is on three phenomena observed in the self-organization of living systems: selection of input data; organization of specialized…

Discourse and conversational analysis methods were used in a qualitative reconstruction of one aspect of the regularities in the way 61 children "do" personal reference. Of particular interest was the development of two reference forms: minimization--preference for simple (one word) forms, or recipient design--reference forms indicating…

Anaphora, a linguistic structure that refers to previously mentioned or implied text, has been implicated as a possible cause of reading comprehension difficulty among children. Reading research has focused on the surface structures of anaphora (pronouns and noun demonstratives, for example) and has viewed comprehension of anaphora as a language…

Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All…