Little is known about language development after late-to-moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal-pair word-learning skills in 18 eighteen-month-old healthy full-term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late-to-moderate preterm infants…

This study explores ways in which university science courses can be infused with opportunities for pre-service teachers to design student student interactions that promote language development and content mastery. Participants included bilingual pre-service teachers enrolled in an elementary science approaches course and its school-based fieldwork…

This study examined the extent and nature of lexical tone deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty Cantonese-speaking Chinese dyslexic children (mean age 8 ; 11) were compared to twenty average readers of the same age (CA control group, mean age 8 ; 11), and another twenty younger average readers of the same word reading level (RL control…

A factor analysis of a test battery that included early first-language (L1) achievement, L1 cognitive ability, second-language (L2) aptitude, and L2 affective measures to predict oral and written L2 proficiency was conducted. The analysis yielded 4 factors that were labeled Language Analysis, composed of L1 and L2 language comprehension, grammar,…

Language development in preschool children was studied using pairs of pictures with three types of verbal elaboration formed for each pair. After a training trial thirty children listened to one of three types of elaboration (simple sentence, compound or complex sentence, and paragraph). They were asked to name the corresponding response item.…

Two studies examined the relationship between phonological sensitivity and 5-year-olds' acquisition of new words that systematically differed in the familiarity of their sound structures. Found that phonological sensitivity was related to pair-associated learning of phonologically unfamiliar, but not familiar, words. Following phonological…

Describes a developmental study of semantic structures in children who are asked to determine the fitness of descriptive labels for line drawings representing a variety of perceptual stimuli. (Author/WY)

Words in categories of high and low "flash-card learnability" and semantic congruence (logical congruence and associative congruence) were tested. Other independent variables were sex and intelligence (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). The dependent variable was time in tenths of seconds, from the first presentation of a word list until the…

Argues that first language acquisition is essentially based on a process very similar to classical conditioning. (TO)

This paper represents an attempt to study the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and to evaluate the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning process. Two experiments--one on first graders and one on first…

Assesses the relative importance of synonymity and antonymity for memory encoding of words for second and sixth graders. Also, the variable of association strength is investigated for both groups through the presentation of false-recognition stimuli. (DP)

Measures of oral language, verbal associative learning, and nonverbal IQ were collected from a mixed unilingual and bilingual random sample of 66 third- and fifth-grade pupils in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Correlational techniques were employed to determine whether, and to what extent, relationships existed between verbal associative learning skill…