Children successfully learn words through overhearing others engaged in verbal interactions. The current studies investigated the degree to which four-year-old overhearers are influenced by the response behaviors of addressees and by the interactional pattern of the speakers and addressees. It was found that while addressee responses on their own…

Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies,…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

Naming appears to be the source of the explosion in language development and involves the integration of the initially separate listener and speaker responses. This integration has a role in the development of reading, writing, and the following and construction of verbal algorithms that make types of complex human behavior possible. Considerable…

PRESENT PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS FOR DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN ARE OF 3 KINDS--(1) AN INVENTORY TYPE WHICH ATTEMPTS TO IDENTIFY DEFICITS WHICH WILL AFFECT SCHOOL LEARNING AND TO OVERCOME THESE THROUGH EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES, (2) A PLAN BASED ON A RECAPITULATION THEORY WHICH ATTEMPTS TO DESCRIBE DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES AND TO COMPENSATE FOR THOSE WHICH A…

IT WAS SUGGESTED THAT THE CHILD, SURROUNDED BY A SEA OF WORDS, SEQUENTIALLY AND SELECTIVELY ACQUIRES THE NOUNS, VERBS, AND PHRASES OF HIS LANGUAGE AS WELL AS GESTURES, INTONATIONS AND DIALECTS OF THOSE WITH WHOM HE INTERACTS. THE RATE AND BREADTH OF THIS ACQUISITION IS INFLUENCED BY THE NATURE OF HIS VERBAL INTERACTIONS WITH THOSE CHARGED WITH HIS…

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

Small group interaction facilitates language development because students tend to be motivated by their peers. Language acquisition, classroom management, and teaching methodology are integrated within a social studies unit to illustrate how children learn. (DF)

Discusses the importance of providing opportunities for children to learn through talk with an adult and contains excerpts from transcripts of parent-child and teacher-student conversations. (DF)

Noting that conversation between adults and young children is a well-known stimulus to language development, but that conversation is seldom fully used in the classroom, this paper argues that conversations can and should be used more. It presents a range of research findings and classroom examples to support that argument. Chapter 1 examines the…

Assuming that an infant's first stage of verbal communication is melodic and the result of controlling the motion of the vocal cords, a question arises concerning the second stage in development. Is it the shaping of the oral cavity of the direction of the articulators? The author's observation of an infant through his first year of development…

This study examined the verbal interaction of teachers and pupils to determine if the quantity and quality of teacher verbalization had significant impact on the verbal test scores of pre-school Head Start Children. Teacher's verbal behavior was scored by a modification of the Caldwell Observer Rating Form. Children were tested using the Wechsler…

With the appropriate software, it is possible to create a pedagogical environment where children can learn to read and write at their own pace; by using the software Fairy-Tale-World, children can print their drawings and texts and learn foreign words easily. (AEF)