Intellectual engagement (IE) refers to enjoyment of intellectual activities and is proposed as causal for knowledge acquisition. The role of IE for cognitive development was examined utilizing 2-year longitudinal data from 112 ninth graders (average baseline age: 14.7 years). Higher baseline IE predicted higher baseline crystallized ability but…

Reports that mothers' responsiveness to young infants' distress predicts language capacity at two years. Mothers' responsiveness to older infants' nondistress vocalizations predicts cognitive performance, perceived self-esteem, social competence, and family relations in preadolescents. (PCB)

This study explores (a) the relative effects of the Learning to Learn Program on the educational competencies of the experimental children (E) who attended the Learning to Learn Program as compared to control children (C) who participated in traditional preschool and primary grade programs; and (b) the developmant and longitudinal educational…

This paper, part of an evaluation of the early intervention project at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, deals primarily with results of the Bayley Mental Development Index (MDI). The MDI was administered to experimental and control infants from lower socioeconomic background at 6, 12 and 18 months of age. Results (discussed in…

A study was conducted to determine whether children give evidence of using any of six comprehension strategies and whether children of same and different ages use different strategies. It was studied how comprehension performance can best be predicted by other facts about the child, including his language and his language input. The six…

Although the relationship between language and intellectual development in children is often ambiguous, language retardation appears to be one of the main ways that a disadvantaged environment hinders achievement. While American research has indicated that nursery education may effectively extend language experience, few studies have been done in…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

Most studies of language acquisition overlook the fact that a child learns language in the context of acquiring the social skill of conversing known as "turn-taking." The few studies of verbal turn-taking in children suggest that prosodic features (suprasegmentals) and turn-taking skills are integrated by the age of two years, nine months, and…

This article hypothesizes that language repetition of young children (in the sense used by Kobashigawa and Snow) does not help language acquisition. The evidence comes from the results of a prior study in which no indication was found that mothers who repeat themselves a great deal have children who acquire language more quickly. However,…

The hypothesis that the acquisition order of relational words directly reflects the complexity of these words in formal linguistic analysis was tested for the singular, non-neuter person pronouns of English. Data on the development of comprehension of these pronouns gathered in two conversational situations, child as person addressed and child as…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a sequenced, highly-structured direct instruction program in language and reading skills on the intellectual growth, academic achievement, and school adjustment of 303 middle class kindergarten children. Children were assigned to one of four treatment groups: a "direct verbal"…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…