This study aimed to identify factors that contribute to bilingual children's decontextualized language production and investigate how schooling experience and bilingualism affect the development of this skill. The word definition skills of seventy Korean-English bilingual children whose first language was Korean, yet who had been schooled in…

This study examined the relation between young English language learners' (ELL) native oral language skills and their language input in transitional bilingual education kindergarten classrooms. Spanish-speaking ELLs' ("n" = 101) Spanish expressive language skills were assessed using the memory for sentences and picture vocabulary…

Three experiments explored young children's metalinguistic awareness. Results showed that children between the ages of 4.5 and 6.5 demonstrate vigorous development of word segmentation skills, using increasingly complex strategies--first phrasal, then syllabic, and finally a full word strategy, and a growing knowledge of function and content…

Tape recorded utterances of a three-year child who was born without cochleas were examined in order to assess the effect of total deafness on vocalization development. Results suggest that although hearing impairment slows the onset of canonical babbling, even total deafness does not preclude its eventual appearance. (33 references) (Author/VWL)

To determine whether written spelling is superior to oral spelling for children in kindergarten through Grade 2, this study compared children's ability to spell real words and nonsense words orally and in writing. By first and second grade, written spellings were superior to oral spellings in both overall quality and representation of phonological…

Presents an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, and concepts about print in three-year-old children. Forty-three normally developing children were given 4 tests of language development: 12 metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and…

Describes a language program designed to allow a 4-year old autistic child to acquire skill across a variety of sentence types. Training focused on teaching combinatorial and semantic properties of grammatical morphemes, thus enabling the child to use sentences, instead of single words and rote phrases. (Author/PJM)

Practice on cognitive tasks, such as word recognition tasks, will usually lead to faster and more stable responding in a second language. An analysis is presented of the relationship between observed reductions in performance latency and latency variability with respect to whether processing has become faster or whether a qualitative change, such…

Reports the longitudinal follow-up of 41 preschool children as they moved into reading. When the children were 3-years-old, they participated in a detailed assessment of their language, print and metalinguistic skills. Overall language development at age 3 just as strongly correlated with reading scores at age 7 as it had with metalinguistic and…