A discussion focusing on the concept of metalinguistic awareness, particularly in bilingual children, precedes a discussion of metalinguistic awareness and its potential relationship with the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. The metalinguistic history and metalinguistic awareness of a subject, bilingual in German and English, are highlighted.…

This study examined perceptual and articulatory confusions among the fricatives /f, v, s, z/ and voiced and unvoiced "th" in preschool children. (These phonemes are among the most difficult for children to articulate.) Seventeen children from 3.3-5.1 years of age were tested on syllables formed by taking all combinations of the six…

This paper reports a study carried out with 14 children (ranging in age from 2.8 to 3.5 years) which investigated children's concepts of difference. Pairs of small objects differing on a number of dimensions were presented to the children. As each pair of objects was presented, children were asked to select the object that was…

Reviews evidence for a developmental sequence in symbolic play and attempts to provide a theoretical rationale for predicting correspondences between symbolic play and early language. (Author/RH)

Presents a system for coding and analyzing dialogue involving preschool age children. Each participant assumes roles of initiator and responder and is evaluated according to different scales. Illustrates the system through recorded dialogue between mothers and their three-year-old daughters. (Author/BK)

Discusses the results of a study designed to determine the metalinguistic awareness of 45 preschool children (15 elementary school children were included to determine the effect of school attendance). The children wre given 3 "metalinguistic" tasks: judging the acceptability of sentences, dividing words, and judging the coherence of…

This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors…

Experiments in eliciting true/false judgments from young children aged 3-5 used a "talking doll," a toy panda with a speaker installed. The procedure has been used in studies of language comprehension, communication skills, and free conversation experiments. (CHK)

Data on the development of fundamental frequency patterns and the emergence of semantic relations during the "one word period" in child language development are reported in this study. The research focuses on the changes that occur as children progress from producing single words to sequences of single words and finally to producing…

Preschool children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either "before" or "after." Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences than for arbitrarily ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of "before" and "after" must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support.…

In retelling 20 stories, 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causation-implied utterances. Other results are discussed. (Author/RM)

Investigates young children's ability to adjust the content of their verbal responses according to what they know their listener knows. Younger and older three-year-old children were able to discern what another person knew and did not know and adjusted their responses accordingly. Younger three-year-olds tended to be underinformative. (SED)

Children aged three to five were the subjects of two studies of the development of ability to classify diverse objects into superordinate categories. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to designate two of three pictorially represented objects as representative of a given category. The second experiment required subjects to choose from a…

A study was conducted to determine whether the child expresses linguistic knowledge during the single-word period. The order of mention in 65 sets of successive single-word utterances from five children at Stage 1, two to four years old, were analyzed. To elicit speech, the children were shown line drawings representing such situations as animate…

Discusses a study designed to determine whether early reading instruction constitutes a positive factor in the cognitive development of children. The subjects for this study were 25 children in a nursery school in Macerata, Italy. (CFM)