The purpose of this study was to examine the short-term effects of a music education intervention on the receptive language skills of students in an at-risk early childhood program. The target population was nine students ages 3, 4, and 5 in an at-risk, inclusive classroom in a Chicago public school. The problem of language delay is indicated in…

The bibliography contains over 50 annotated citations of research on the nature of maternal speech and its effects on child language development. It is limited to studies focusing on verbal features of mothers' speech to normal one-to-four-year-olds learning English. The first section is devoted to literature describing characteristics specific to…

Four age levels of 80 learning disabled (LD) students (7.5-8.11, 9.0-10.5, 10.6-11.11, and 12.0-13.5 years) participated in an examination of syntactic maturity and vocabulary richness in their oral language. Ss were shown two films without the sound turned on, and were then tape recorded as they told the story of the film in their own words.…

In order to conduct a sociolinguistic analysis of language acquisition, data were collected on one bilingual child's speech through diary notes and tape recordings made at regular intervals from birth to age 5, with special attention given to contextual information related to each speech event. The child's languages include Spanish, English, and a…

A testing instrument, the Experimental Phoneme Sequence Test (EPST), was devised to collect baseline information for studying receptive knowledge of phoneme sequencing in normal articulating kindergarten and elementary school children. One hundred kindergarten through fourth-grade children, five male and five female subjects at each half-year…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of 32 kindergarten, first, second, and third grade children to comprehend selected grammatical features, to explain the meaning of these grammatical features and to produce them while reading orally. It was found that there were significant differences among tasks, grammatical features, and…

This study looked at the period when language development overlaps the early years of reading, to see how children read and comprehend complex syntactic structures. Thirty-six second, third, and fourth graders, who were considered average readers, were tested in the first experiment using a reading test to determine comprehension of individual…

The purpose of this study was to delineate the implications of language within an educational context as a means of facilitating self-actualization. Three premises identified in a priori fashion were drawn from the literature in linguistics, psychology, and general semantics, creating a three-part language continuum--acquisition, development, and…

Kindergarten and first-grade children participated in a study of the role of reciprocal and inversion reversibility in language acquisition and cognitive development. Subjects completed cognitive tasks assessing conservation, seriation, and class inclusion, and language tasks assessing the active-passive transformation and the negative…

Parent training on a daily basis has a positive effect on the number of verbal interactions between mother and infant. However, parent training did not seem to be a factor influencing the social-emotional and physical development activities of the teenage mothers in this study. Three groups of teenage mothers were observed with their infants in…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

To investigate children's ability to make linguistic judgments, a 60-item Awareness of Acceptable Sentences task was constructed. This task and the reading subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were administered to 144 children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Analyses of results indicated that children's performance on the…

A study examined the type of Wh question (those introduced by who, what, when, where, why, or how) and the phrase structure rules required for the verb phrase to determine how they relate to the acquisition and development of the Wh question transformation. Children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were given three tasks, each containing 36…

The comprehension of the Minimum Distance Principle was examined in three experiments, using the "tell/promise" sentence construction. Experiment one compared the listening and reading comprehension of singly presented sentences, e.g. "John tells Bill to bake the cake" and "John promises Bill to bake the cake." The…