Mental State Talk (MST) is utterances describing invisible mental aspects. The first aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of Parental MST and Child MST and their concurrent association in a Swedish population, and the second aim was to relate these MST measures to the children's general language abilities. Seventy-seven dyads…

Adolescents (N = 46; M = 12.46 years) who had previously participated in a longitudinal study of autobiographical memory development narrated their early childhood memories, interpreted life events, and completed a family history questionnaire and language assessment. Three distinct components of adolescent memory emerged: (1) age of earliest…

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension…

The normal" six-year old has control of all aspects of his language when he begins attending school. The teacher must expand these skills. (MF)

Jean Piaget's ideas regarding symbolic function are expanded in this paper to provide a model to use in distinguishing between general symbolic versus specific linguistic deficits in language disordered children (whose disorders are not due primarily to intellectual, sensory, motor, or social-emotional deficits). In applying this model to the…

This paper suggests that language study focus its attention more on the pedagogical needs of educators by offering them a more comprehensive dialectical and unifying theory of language development that could then present the process as a holistic endeavor instead of as a set of separate linguistic acquisitions. Specifically, it suggests the use…

This study investigates the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) skills in deaf children and input from their hearing mothers. Twenty-two hearing mothers and their deaf children (ages 4-10 years) participated in tasks designed to elicit talk about the mind. The mothers' mental state talk was compared with that of 26 mothers with hearing…

This paper integrates a recent conceptual shift in middle childhood language acquisition research--the study of metalinguistic development--with a Piagetian perspective on cognitive development to propose a theoretical framework from which to consider language development during this period. The paper first defines metalinguistics and then uses a…

Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…

Discusses research with children with learning problems to discover, through their narratives, in what ways they were disabled and what ways they were competent with language and to test the narrative mind theory to see if their stories could be interpretive metaphors for their lives. (HTH)

Touches on the cognitive and self-discovery processes and imagination and creativity children experience before their verbal skills are fully developed. (HTH)

Concludes that sound awareness scores significantly predicated performance of kindergarten children on a sight-word learning task and a decoding-like task. Subjects' knowledge of terminology was unrelated to success on either task. (FL)