Found no correlations between types of play behavior and speech measures, that identification of objects upon verbal request was not related to any type of play behavior, and that comprehension of verbal requests for functional or representational play was positively correlated with the display of such play. Journal availability: J. B. Lippincott…

This article discusses a study designed to determine the order of acquisition of the two expressions "in front of" and "behind," using two featureless objects. (CFM)

A study of children's recognitory comprehension, the rudimentary ability to begin decoding the content of language, at the end of the first year had as subjects 36 infants aged 10.5, 11.5, and 12.5 months. In an examination of monthly developmental change in their ability to comprehend newly introduced referential terms, the children were exposed…

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

In testing kindergartners and first graders in their comprehension of the words "before" and "after," it was found that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. (Author/NCR)

Preschool children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers "very" and "sort of" was experimentally investigated in 64 children. (Author/NCR)

This experiment used two groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers to test for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. (NCR)

This study investigated preschool children's understanding of the words "know" and "guess." Subjects for the study were 48 male and female preschool children ranging in age from 3.6 to 6.6 years. The children were divided into three age groups representing one year intervals. The task for the study involved a "guessing" game in which a colored…

The recent experimental literature on the acquisition of English antonyms is reviewed, with special reference to the position of Eve Clark and the particular ontogenetic assumptions her position entails. The assumptions examined are: (1) in a hierarchically organized lexical domain, the order of acquisition appears to be from the top of the…

To produce and evaluate a language development program for culturally deprived preschool children based on characteristics of Piaget's theory of intelligence, a 6-week experimental study was carried out in Project Headstart, Starkville, Mississippi. Randomly-selected, 45 Negro Headstart enrollees made up three groups--two were taught the…

This book offers an "organic" approach to teaching based on the recognition of the opposing human forces of destructiveness and creativity. The experience of teaching in a Maori school in New Zealand for 24 years provides the background of this personal story. With much of the content presented in anecdotal fashion, the quality and…

The purpose of this study is to compare the English syntactic structures produced in spontaneous oral language and the receptive English syntactic and vocabulary skills of bilingual Spanish and Indian children and monolingual Anglo-Americans, all of whom qualify for Title I elementary schools (Grades 1-6). People in Action, the Northwestern Syntax…

Research was conducted to study systematically the comprehension and production of the pronouns "he, she, him, her" in the language of normal and linguistically deviant children. The purposes of the study were to: observe the manner in which normal children comprehend and produce these four pronouns, in terms of both their use and their…

Noting the scientifically substantiated link between children's early family experience and their later intellectual growth, this book describes a longitudinal study of the circumstances of early language learning and the central role of home and family in the emergence of language and word learning. The vocabularies of 42 children were studied…

This paper reviews current literature concerning the development of children's comprehension of the processes of natural languages and it recommends a new study approach designed to evaluate the joint effects of lexical and syntactic devices on comprehension. It discusses three main kinds of investigations--studies of the comprehension of…