Some psychologically salient meaning properties of lexical items were isolated using judgments about the similarity of meaning within three sets of words: verbs of judging, hypothetical verbs, and locative prepositions. Subjects were asked to rate the similarity of meaning of all possible pairs of words from one of the three domains on a 1-9…

A sample of 79 first grade children, selected from a total sample of 350 subjects from an upper middle class school district, were involved in this study. The sample population was divided into three reading groups (depending on their reading scores) to permit statistical comparisons among groups with differentiated reading achievements. A battery…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

In order to determine whether a child can learn to read more easily from a meaningful context, a six-year-old child was taught to read by a meaning-based approach in which lexical items were introduced in sentences and the semantic context of the material was suited to the child's level of development. This instructional approach also incorporated…

The purpose of this study was to develop guidelines and to construct a model which would show the various facets of a secondary school reading program and which could be followed in the development of such a program. The procedures for research included a review of the literature, the development of a set of guidelines and a model for a reading…

The purpose of this study was fourfold: (1) to conduct a qualitative diagnosis of the oral reading of selected middle school underachievers utilizing miscue analysis; (2) to select, design, and implement reading strategy lessons (RSL) based on psycholinguistic principles; (3) to determine to what extent the subjects were helped through the use of…

This paper brings together modern linguistic theory (particularly transformational-Generative analysis), psycholinguistic research, and educational objectives underlying the teaching of language in order to develop a methodology compatible with the philosophy of "the New English." Based on the premise that at its best, the New English is…

The studies reported here constitute part of a project on language development and social influence. The question of what to do to obtain a linguistic development that is not retarded by an unfavorable environment is discussed, relative to different value systems. In the first three chapters a theoretical background is given in which…

Comprehension levels necessary to the acquisition and retention of facts, concepts, and rules and the facilitating effects of the use of orienting directions and postadjunct questions were investigated in a study involving 105 sixth-grade students. Four treatment groups each received a version of a six-page fictional passage, differing in the use…

The role of visual imagery in the learning of letter-sound combinations was investigated using such mediating images as two scoops of ice cream for the letter "m." In a preliminary study, high-, medium-, and low-strength mediating images were determined for each letter-sound combination. The 216 kindergarten subjects in the main study were…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

This dissertation examines the principles of two current theories of first language acquisition and from them synthesizes a second language methodology. As a background to the problem of second language methodology, it is stated that the basing of second language methodologies on first language learning is currently being questioned and that the…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if there were significant relationships between the 12 subtest scores of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) and the seven scores of the verbal and figural tests of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The subjects were a stratified random sample of 40 second grade…

Gestural behavior between mothers and young children was hypothesized to be important in the acquisition of communicative competence. It was presumed that a typology of gestural function could assess non-verbal behavior. Data consisted of sound film samples of feeding and bathing events of three subject pairs. Initially the children ranged in age…

This study investigated the linguistic characteristics of speech addressed to the child and the features of the verbal environment critical for learning language. The study focused on the prosodic and paralinguistic features of adult speech to the young child. Adult speech directed to children was compared to other kinds of systematic speech…