The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…

Draws implications for the teaching and learning of writing from the language acquisition of children, based on the contention that human capacities for acquiring language do not change qualitatively as people mature. (DD)

Reviews past and present research on early communication and language intervention at the Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, presenting three premises that inform most of the Kennedy Center's research on the issue, summarizing seven lines of contemporary research by Kennedy Center investigators that influence the development of…

Six experiments involving 192 infants and 1 experiment with 16 college students examined sensitivity to acoustic correlates of phrasal units in English. A basic finding is that nine-month-old infants are sensitive to acoustic markers that correspond to major phrasal units, a sensitivity that develops after six months. (SLD)

Evaluates a teaching program called TRAC (Talk, Reasoning, and Computers) that is used for scaffolding children's effective use of language as a tool for reasoning and collaborative activity. Finds that using the TRAC program can increase the amount of exploratory talk used by children working together in the classroom. (CMK)

Investigates comprehension of metaphoric compounds. The study asked children and adults to identify referents of various types of these compounds. Findings reveal that 5-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds but performed significantly less well than adults and that 3-year-olds did not generally interpret the compounds literally. (37 references)…

This article explains how the relationships among teacher language, pupil language, and teaching and learning in the schools are explored in a postgraduate course that trains secondary school teachers at a British college. Students practice teach in urban, multiethnic schools in conjunction with the course. (Author/PP)

Five articles explore ideas about the nature and kinds of courses dealing with language and education that should be developed in teacher education programs in the Australian school curriculum, specifically where English as mother tongue is used. They include: "Some Recent Developments in Mother Tongue English Teaching in Australia"…

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on language learning and the young child is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) instructional strategies in teaching synonyms, antonyms, classification, paraphrasing, and locating a main idea; (2) formal aspects of metaphor; (3) linguistic…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: communications curricula for technical education programs; the recorded oral communication of business students; interactions between parents and speech-language…

Papers in English, French, and Portuguese address topics of creativity and its relationship to: native language instruction by television; conditions of language production at the moment of the emergence of creativity; comparison teaching; foreign language teachers; modern language instruction; psychological, pedagogical, and cultural…