The process by which 55 preschool children acquire the meanings of dimensional and expressive terms was investigated in relation to Eve Clark's semantic feature hypothesis. (Author/MP)

Research addressing development of mechanistic models capable of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data is reviewed. Research focuses on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics--in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics, cognitive development, and the importance of simplified…

Considers language growth of secondary school students in terms of their using language to organize real experiences, their awareness of audience, and their ability to manage language for specific purposes and situations. Provides anecdotes of classroom conditions that promoted such student language growth. (RL)

Grade seven and undergraduate Chinese bilinguals in Hong Kong speaking Chinese and English were tested for forward and backward digit span in the respective languages. Developmental differences were noted and a bilingual auditory storage index was suggested as one indication of bilingual development. (CM)

The article describes a beginning reading program that was planned and implemented by an interdisciplinary team for 14 first-grade language-handicapped children. (DLS)

A position paper which discusses different aspects of reading and its relation to school, home, and lifelong activities, and suggests instructional implications. (CM)

Describes the prevalence and types of behavior problems found in a sample of 418 preschool children in North London, United Kingdom. (MP)

Describes a study that examined how audience differences, realized as varying degrees of intimacy or familiarity with a writer, affect syntactic and strategic aspects of style and that sought to determine the extent to which audience adaptation is developmental among fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students as well as expert adults. (DD)

A study involving 65 children from 5.6 to 9.5 years of age suggested that the average child's ability to differentiate spoken words from other units of speech improves with age and that significant relationships exist between children's knowledge of spoken words and their reading achievement. (GT)

Measures of pragmatic development for children in the second year of life were developed based on a 30-minute language sample drawn from 20 children. Results support the view that the range of pragmatic functions grows steadily during the one-word and early two-word stage and that it is measurable. (Author/AM)

Study examined relationship between use of grammatical and rhetorical skills in writing and performance in reading for children in grades 1 through 3. Apparently certain linguistic skills are common to both disciplines and these skills become more critical to both writing and reading as the child matures. (DS)

The attribution of function of various kinds to elements of child speech is discussed, and the question of the validity of the interpretations on which such attribution rests is explored with reference to Halliday's work on the development of meaning. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to determine what effect exposure to linguistic input pertinent to kinship terms and kinship relations has on the acquisition of the meaning of such terms. The subjects were 84 German children living in families, and 84 orphans. (Author/CFM)

Reports on studies examining the extent to which mothers tailor their speech to a child's level of linguistic ability. Methodological implications for language acquisition research are discussed. (AM)

A neural model in the form of a servo-mechanism is developed to account for certain aspects of language and speech in the human nervous system. Emphasis is placed on encoding processes as well as on-going feedback during production. (SW)