Describes a study which explored developmental changes in preschoolers' knowledge of the writing system. The children were asked to write four utterances without knowing the purpose of the request and without additional explanations. The purpose was to determine how early children's graphic responses in decontextualized situations have features of…

Describes a study that examined the organization inherent in children's misarticulations of final consonant sounds. Specifically, it inquired whether, when children with final stop and fricative omissions are taught to produce either stops or fricatives in word-final positions, generalization occurs to untaught items or only to taught items.…

Describes a study that compared the language abilities of first and third grade children. The children's narratives were analyzed for differences in T-units and the use of reference and conjoining. Results indicate that the older children used longer T-units and generally had more cohesive ties within their narratives. (Author/SED)

Experimentally tests for direction of causality in negative correlations previously found between a measure of teacher control of conversation and measures of deaf primary school children's initiative and loquacity. Results show that as teachers change style, their students follow them, exhibiting changes in initiative and mean length of turn. (RH)

Investigates the nature of threats and their responses as collaborative units in children's discourse. Research indicates that girls prefer withhold-object or action and harm-threats while boys focus exclusively on harm-threats. Younger children produce more threats than older children, and threats occur more frequently in child-directed settings…

Concludes that choral reading poetry is a good small-group, or even whole class approach, to building oral reading fluency in terms of both theoretical support and feasibility in classroom teaching situations. (FL)

Discusses efforts at teaching children in kindergarten how to write, indicating that emergent readers can indeed write with scribbles, random letters, numerals, and sometimes words. Discusses their dictation, journal content, writing stages, and developmental trends. (HTH)

Focuses on the child's acquisition of conversational competence. Explores what conversational abilities the child acquires in early interactions with his/her mother. (PD)

Reviews the literature on role-taking and adaptive communication. Concludes that researchers should consider social cognition processes other than role-taking in exploring the connection between social perception and adaptive communication. (PD)

Describes communicative development in terms of interactive change, beginning at birth and organized into three general kinds of interaction: primordial sharing, proto-conversation, and conversation. (PD)

Recognizes and praises the research of Margaret Donaldson for what it reveals about children's thinking and highlights three central contributions of her work to the understanding of children's language learning. (HOD)

Urges teachers to leave an expressive domain for the young child's writing, in which the audience is the young child. (DD)

Indicates that the teaching of rhyming words is the most efficient initial presentation of consonant-vowel-consonant words for beginning readers. (RB)

Describes a study showing that mentally retarded children and mentally normal children do not differ fundamentally in cognitive development within the framework of a particular cognitive training. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The acquisition of speech in the infant is discussed, and the hypothesis advanced that the maturing infant gains access to the more elaborated communication system of his language community through his total communicative experience with more developed human interactants. (Author/RM)