A highly structured language instruction program was used for 4 months to accelerate the verbal development of 10 Down's syndrome children 4- to 7-years-old. (DB)

Through careful selection of trade books, teachers can promote children's awareness of language. This paper cites numerous trade books that may be used to help children develop appreciation of alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and rhyme, and it recommends a number of alphabet books, animal stories, and books in which word meanings, interesting…

Forty-eight pupils from grades one, three, and five participated in a study of the extent to which children are able to use their prior knowledge and expectancies to aid them in integrating verbal material and in drawing appropriate inferences. Six stories were constructed for each of four inference levels, and 11 questions were prepared for each…

This paper begins with a review of recent studies of the development of phonology, syntax, and semantics between the ages of five and twelve. Studies in pragmatics (or the functions of language) are also considered. The paper then turns from investigations of oral language acquisition to an examination of the interplay between oral and written…

The purpose of this study was to gather information on the acquisition of non-Indo-European languages. The field work was conducted in the village of Faleasao on the island of Ta'u in the Manu'a group of American Samoa from June, 1968 to June, 1969. The data collected consists primarily of tape recordings of naturally occurring and elicited speech…

This paper examines children's early attempts at describing events absent in space and time, referred to as the "reportative function." The first part of the paper offers some explanations for the late emergence of the reportative function in young children's speech. Part two presents examples of children's attempts to report past events…

This study describes some aspects of the emergence of displaced reference (talking about topics other than those in the immediate context) in conversations between a child and her parents. The data consisted of tape recorded interaction with the child between 17 and 36 months. During this period, speech about the here and now always dominated, but…

Social cognition refers to that ability which makes it possible for one to infer another's covert, inner psychological experiences and to interact with that individual accordingly (Shantz 1975; Flavell 1977). Piaget (1926) maintains that the ability to decenter socially and to take into account the perspective of another develops gradually as the…

Noting that the question of how to evaluate the effect of an educational program on child language reduces to the question of how to analyze child language, the author discusses ways to measure those functional aspects of child language which may be most sensitive to both environmental interferences and environmental facilitations. (Author/JM)

This is a report on an investigation of the correct production of /s/ in spontaneous speech of children. A greater incidence of incorrect production was found for pre-boundary /s/ than for /s/ in other lexical positions. Lexical position is related to articulatory inconsistencies in child speech. (SC)

Part 4 of a series on Art Education for the Disadvantaged Child. Paper presented at annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Chicago, February 1965), and also appears in "Studies in Deprivation, July 1968.