A discussion of the difficulties in testing language production in educationally subnormal children, and the development of a procedure attempting to overcome those difficulties. (RY)

A referential communication task was used to compare the effects of linguistic structure on the encoding and decoding performances of 120 five- and seven-year-old children. Results suggested that differences in adjective ordering rules and stylistic variation affect encoding and decoding accuracy. (Author/MP)

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)

The focus of this review is on children's verbalized knowledge about various aspects of reading (gained primarily from interviews) rather than the regulation of that knowledge, which tends to be the other well-represented division in metacognitive research. (Author/CT)

Describes study designed to contribute empirical evidence about syllables from native speakers' actual syllabification of words and determine how evidence reflects on syllable theories proposed. Concludes speakers can recognize and isolate basic syllables as phonological unit within words; there are basic constraints on shapes of syllables all…

While proficiency tests make a positive statement about the language ability of those who pass, it says nothing about those who don't. Since the proficiency test's questions are too general, a "sufficiency" test was developed to determine if students had "enough" English to meet the needs that motivated their study. (PJM)

Explores two questions: What is the nature of older children's syntactic knowledge, and how is that knowledge used in an everyday speech situation? Subjects were 96 children at each of three grade levels: 6, 8, and 10. (MP)

An English reading program for non-English-speaking Canadian immigrant children is based on the premise that a reader's ability to understand a text is based on his capacity to organize written material into linguistically meaningful units. (MB)

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…

How beginning teachers learn to teach has been the focus of a substantial amount of research. The process is complex, and a number of theories and models have been put forward. For example, Fuller and Bown's (1975) well-known classification of beginning teachers' concerns into self, task and impact (and the sequential nature of these categories)…

Children's observation of the given-new contract was tested with a task requiring children to provide novel, rather than known, information about an event to a listener. Study 1 revealed developmental differences in children's adherence to the contract: 4- and 5-year-olds showed better adherence to the contract than 3-year-olds. In Studies 2 and…

Pragmatic proficiency has been incorporated in the EFL teaching and testing syllabi in China, but the corresponding tests still focus on linguistic competence. The gap between the teaching and testing is mainly due to the lack of generally accepted measures of communicative abilities such as pragmatic competence. This study developed a…