The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home…

The number of students who are English language learners (ELL) is increasing significantly across the United States. As this number increases, so does the number of students who are ELL and being identified as having disabilities. The intersection of English language instruction and special education is an emerging field of scholarship, and it is…

Early childhood experiences have a great effect on the course of a child's life. Preschool education can offer benefits for children, particularly those who do not have advantages at home, including benefits related to academic skills, social-emotional development, and communication. Thus, preschool experiences are a potential key to improving…

Research Findings: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of linguistic training based on the use of the Drežancic method in educational settings. It is hypothesized that characteristics of this method, based on the typical stages of linguistic and cognitive development, could influence both language competence and executive function (EF). A…

This study provides experimental evidence for preschool children's competence in basic information structure, with particular attention to the notions of topic and focus. It investigates their mastery of structural and definiteness distinctions to encode the information status of discourse referents, and seeks to distinguish linguistic competence…

This study investigated vowel discrimination in 8-week-old infants. Using a nonnutritive, high-amplitude sucking measure in a habituation-dishabituation paradigm. (Author/SB)

Details findings indicating that most early linguistic competence is item based. Maintains that language development proceeds without evidence of system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. Suggests that findings are not easily explained by the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other external…

The proposal that young children's communicative intentions stem from prelinguistic cognitive abilities is examined in detail. The most developed available formulation of this proposal, that provided by Brown (1973), is evaluated, and the evidence in support of it is found to be insufficient. Three crucial problems, which must be solved before an…

This paper presents a selective review of the literature addressing the influence of young children's conversational environments and interactions on their psychological understanding of persons. Our dual purposes are to reveal some consensus on the current state of knowledge and to foster a programmatic approach to future research. The initial…

Analyzes the developmental patterns in the production of analogy by second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students to determine whether children use different types of analogy as they achieve linguistic maturity. (HOD)

Describes the ability of two boys to speak backward and discusses private speech play behavior in relation to linguistic, cognitive, and social development. (EKN)

To learn how children acquire "metalinguistic competence," the development of the concept of "the word" was experimentally studied in four- to ten-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

The present volume reflects the proceedings of the fourth annual symposium at the Carnegie-Mellon University, which dealt with developmental linguistics in general and with child language acquisition in particular. Contents include an Introduction by John R. Hayes; "Derivational Complexity and Order of Acquisition in Child Speech," by R. Brown and…

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

Correspondences between printed and spoken messages are seen to be based on meaning; expectancies about syntax and semantics lead the reader to form hypotheses which can be confirmed or not with only a small portion of cues available in the text. (Author)