This study investigated the effect of day care attendance on the receptive and expressive language development of nine 4-year-old children. Five children who had 2 years of day care experience comprised a day care group. A home-reared group was composed of four children who had 3 months of day care experience. Children's receptive language ability…

Linguistics is the study of language, as contrasted with knowledge of a specific language. Formal linguistics is the study of the structures and processes of language, or how it works and is organized. Different approaches to formal linguistics include traditional or prescriptive, structural, and generative or transformational perspectives. Formal…

A cross-cultural study examined preschoolers' knowledge of elementary components of the writing system. Subjects were 41 Chinese and 44 American preschool students between the ages of 2 and 4. The students were presented with sets of cards depicting familiar objects, capitalized English letters, and Chinese characters and were asked to turn each…

This study hypothesized that an intervention program that would develop students' language facility in lower elementary school might increase the students' likelihood of retention. An outgrowth of a family literacy project which focused on raising the literacy level of an Appalachian community, the study used the Language Experience Approach which…

A practicum was designed and implemented to foster 24 second graders' literacy and language development via child-centered as opposed to curriculum-centered experiences. The primary goal was to improve students' quality and quantity of writing by allowing extra time, much exposure to more and various non-basal literature, hands-on activities, and…

A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is examined for its implications for acquisition of verb movement. Mark Baker's proposal extends the Move-alpha rule to posit that the head of any phrase may be moved to become incorporated into the head of any phrase that properly governs the phrase where…

Several conditions, identified by Cambourne (1988) as contributing to children becoming successful language users, have been simulated in Australian schools in order for children to feel self-assured in mastering writing and reading just as these conditions have promoted the developmental process of talking in the home. The conditions are:…

Giving children opportunities to image and draw the words in the text and what they represent tends to unblock and extend children's potential abilities to assimilate and synthesize language. Evaluation of representational drawing need not be a barrier which discourages teachers from allowing children to draw. In effect, it might be judicious to…

This article describes how, over the past 25 years, sociolinguistics and education have entered into a methodological and intellectual dialogue that has significantly changed both views of language and theories of how language enters into school learning processes. The first section, "Literacy, Language and the Problem of Differential Learning,"…

By assigning negative value to egocentric language, Jean Piaget equates depersonalized thought and logic with maturity, and gives disproportionate favor to socialized language. By focusing on the deterministic ends to be gained through the acquisition of socialized language, Piaget misses the value of egocentric language. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,…

A longitudinal study evaluated the Cambridge Lesley literacy Project as implemented in the Longfellow School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Five years of data on the progress of all children from kindergarten through third grade in both the Spanish bilingual program and the standard program were gathered during twice-weekly visits to the…

The study evaluated whether specifically language impaired (SLI) children (N=6 and ages 5-8) manifested atypical or normal but delayed development in their interpretation of PRO (an empty pronomial element which has also been termed "a missing complement subject"). Language samples were taken and analyzed twice over a 9-12 month period. Among…

In the context of increasing criticism of bilingual education and the use of native language instruction, it must be remembered that they are based on a sound rationale. First, they address the need for continued learning as the child moves from one language to the other. Second, they address the need to diminish the alienation which children feel…

Developed as part of the Family, Infant, and Toddler Project, and intended as a guide for parent groups, the document focuses on such topics as instruction, child development, and family concerns related to children with handicaps. Individual topic guides provide information on ways to begin the parent group meeting, information to consider,…

An integral part of London's early identification process involves an assessment of each pupil's speech and language development. During the 1981-82 school year some initial work was done on the development of a Kindergarten Language Screening Test (KLST). As a result, the KLST was modified and shortened. This paper reports the data derived from…