Described is a study in which videotape recordings of the language of 11 hearing impared children (2-4 years old) were analyzed according to 16 pragmatic and 13 semantic functions. Findings are presented for the following study aspects: reliability of coding, effects of degree of hearing loss and intervention, oral communicative behavior,…

Patterns which partly resemble the proposed "fronting,""voicing," and "stopping" tendencies exist to a statistically significant degree in David Olmsted's large sample of child speech. Instead of the "voicing" pattern that has been suggested, however, voiced stops seem to be favored word-initially, but voiced fricatives are favored word-finally.…

The San Luis Valley Bilingual Bicultural Program was begun in 10 schools at the kindergarten level. Each year the next higher grade was to be implemented until the program was in existence from K-4. During 1972-73, there were 1,092 kindergarten and first grade children and 86 teaching staff participating in the program. Its primary goal was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences among four oral language elicitation probes used to collect language samples from young children. Ten kindergarten, ten first-grade, and ten second-grade children provided the oral language samples. Each class was divided by sex, and five boys and five girls from each grade were randomly…

This book takes a broad look at children learning to communicate with words, sentences, body language, and touch. It shows how children learn to communicate effectively in everyday situations by selecting the most appropriate communication strategies--the verbal and nonverbal language which they feel are best suited to the situation. Part 1…

The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…

These forty conference papers deal with a wide variety of new approaches to the application of developmental theory. The papers represent a cross-section of current research methodology and techniques used to evaluate such traditional Piagetian topics as concrete and formal operations, conservation, classification skills, language development,…

Concern about typical early identification procedures used with kindergarten children to predict potential reading failure is expressed in this paper. A diagnostic procedure for screening kindergarten children and then prescribing an individualized program for each child is described. The screening battery--Prediction with Diagnostic Qualities…

Speech discrimination by 12 children aged about 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years was tested, using the discrimination learning procedure of Shvachkin's 1948 Russian study. Recent work on the acquisition of syntax and semantics shows an ordered acquisition for linguistic items; this pilot study was to test whether the ability to discriminate between consonants…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

This study focuses on the significance of specific maternal language teaching techniques in the early language development of the child. A recording was made of the verbal and nonverbal interactions in 20 mother-child dyads during a one-hour session in the home. The linguistic level for each of the children, who ranged from 1.9 to 5.0 years in…

The main purposes of this handbook are to present a series of activities and performance goals intended to improve the English program in Baltimore County; to establish the basic language skills and experiences that all students at each grade level should have; and to suggest a number of methods and procedures for implementing these learning…

Fricatives and affricates in different word positions and initial fricative clusters were elicited from three linguistically deviant children (ages five years, two months to seven years) and one normal child (age two years, nine months) by means of pictures depicting familiar objects. Data from two of the older children and the normal child are…

This 24-item annotated bibliography is intended to facilitate introduction to the field of sign language studies. It lists selected published works in English in which sign language is viewed from several different aspects, including: theoretical studies (nos. 1, 5, 6, 19, 20 and 21); works relating Sign to other visual communication systems (nos.…

The primary focus of this paper is on black children and the relationship between their productive and receptive language competencies. The solutions which have been proposed to solve the dilemma of black pupils' poor reading achievement are discussed. It is noted that none of the proposed solutions has the unqualified support provided by a mass…