Principles of language assessment and instruction for Spanish speaking preschoolers at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, are presented. Basic definitions and program model (which looks at the child's communication skills based purely on semantic content contained in spontaneous language samples) are explained. The program's theoretical bases…

The Bilingual Reading Study employs several measures of oral language proficiency: (1) a standardized oral language proficiency test, the Language Assessment Scales (LAS); (2) teacher ratings on the Student Operational Language Assessment Scale (SOLA); (3) teacher ratings on the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) Oral Language…

This paper provides counselors and social service case workers serving Indochinese refugees in northern California with guidelines for identifying, treating and making referrals of clients with emotional problems. Freud's theory of trauma neurosis and its effect on refugees' language acquisition, learning ability and job readiness are described.…

Research indicates the importance of the relationship between music, adult/child interaction, language practice, rhythm, repetition, familiarity of content, and story time, and a child's oral language development. Folk songs that have been illustrated and put into book form--"stories that sing"--can be used by parents and teachers to…

The second half of a pilot study on bilingual education (first half presented at the 1979 Rocky Mountain Educational Research Association conference) focused on whether bilingual education established classroom environments to promote a transition in language or the learning of and in two languages. Each of 43 observers trained in time estimation…

Seventy-four high school seniors participated in a study that examined the construct validity of vocabulary tests and the nature of verbal ability by integrating findings and theories of cognitive psychology with those of differential psychology. The subjects completed three kinds of measurement instruments: (1) an experimental faceted vocabulary…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationships between the cognitive variables of cognitive style, understanding of linguistic concepts, and knowledge of word boundaries, as well as their relationships to three measures of reading in beginning and more advanced readers. The children's Embedded Figures Test, a linguistic concept test, a…

This investigation provides descriptive information about the developmental characteristics of syntactic and morphological structures found in the written Spanish language of native Spanish-speaking students in fourth to ninth grades. A sample population composed of 34 male and 56 female Spanish-speaking students was randomly selected from two…

A total of 224 subjects participated in a study to determine how children and adults comprehend logical connectives. Specifically, the study examined the effects of age, content, and practice on the encoding and combination of logical relationships expressed by six types of logical connectives: conjunction, disjunction, conditionality,…

This research discusses the probability of child witnesses providing a complete and accurate description of an event. Children have been regarded as particularly inaccurate, highly suggestible, and basically unreliable in court cases. Psychologists have concluded that younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults, and a…

This paper reports on an experiment undertaken to delineate more clearly the relationship between the naming process in children and certain aspects of the environment which may play a role in that process. The investigation concerned the effect of manipulation and of object novelty on naming. Sixteen children, ten girls and six boys, ranging in…

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

This paper describes part of a larger study dealing with syntax and semantics of the child's early speech about motion and location. It suggests that goal, defined as the point at which a motion ends and a resulting locative state begins, is the organizing principle for the semantics of motion and location. The data presented here are from two…

Linguistic and pedagogical considerations about children's use of a second language in the classroom are discussed with reference to samples of speech obtained from ten to twelve year old children in Germany. The children had been taught the second language of English. The speech is examined in relation to functional and sociolinguistic criteria…

This introduction to, and comment upon, a symposium on communicative competence argues that the appropriate unit of analysis in language development is communicative competence and proposes that the development of communicative competence can be studied usefully through observing children's communication during role play. Communicative competence…