This study compared relative effectiveness of imitative treatment and conversational recast treatment in 7 children (ages 55-79 months) with language impairment and 7 controls. Target acquisition was faster under conversational recast treatment for both groups. Language-impaired children learned grammatical structures as efficiently as…

Discusses how and why accidents with toys happen and provides guidelines for selection of safe and developmentally appropriate toys. Covers selection of toys for infants, toddlers, and preschool children and includes a list of examples of unsafe toys and their manufacturers. (EV)

Discusses advances in the field of child language and three major findings in language development: (1) infant communication begins at birth; (2) warning signs of language delay are evident by age 2; and (3) the benefits of reading aloud to young children can be strengthened through parent education. (CR)

Discusses the implications of the stage theory of critical thinking development. Argues that people actively pass through the predictable stages of unreflective, challenged, beginning, practicing, advanced, and master thinkers and that educators must bring critical thinking into instruction at the foundational level. Analyzes implications for…

Examined the relation between 3- to 5-year-olds' beliefs about the tendency for antisocial behavior to remain stable over time and their reasoning about peer interactions. Found that children who endorsed sociomoral stability beliefs were less likely than their peers to make prosocial inferences, were rated by their teachers as less likely to…

This article first considers how plasticity of the brain in response to differential experience was discovered in research with laboratory rats around 1960. Animal research soon followed on effects of enriched experience as therapy for brain dysfunction. Relations between animal research and some human therapies are considered. (Contains…

Three experiments investigated 2- to 6-month-olds' perception of the continuity of an object trajectory that was briefly occluded. Results across experiments provided little evidence of veridical responses to trajectory occlusion in the youngest infants, but by 6 months, perception completion was more robust. Results suggest that perceptual…

Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…

Focuses on the tensions between two psychological frameworks in the negotiation of teaching practices, curriculum, and ideas about what constitutes childhood: (1) the theories of Jean Piaget focused on behavior at different developmental stages; or (2) the Susan Isaacs research that took a general view of children's intellectual capabilities. (CMK)

Reports on a study designed to determine whether there is a common level of logic, related to age, underlying children's responses to musical and spatial analogical tasks. Finds that there is a relationship between age and children's responses to analogical tasks whether one uses musical or spatial relationships. Discusses implications for music…

Two antithetical views of the sense-making potential of young children are explored: the Piagetian egocentric view and the sociocentric view. The article suggests that empirical research demonstrates socially construed perspective-taking tasks do not show the young child to be egocentric, but sociocentric. (IAH)

The theoretical framework, methodology, findings, and implications for three studies which explored the relationship between adult development, collaborative action research, and instructional supervision are discussed. Each study concluded that educators define and practice supervision in qualitatively different ways depending upon their own…

Analysis of longitudinal data on the phonetic development of Swedish infants (N=4) from 1 through 17 months of age showed five distinct stages in early vocalization development: glottal; velar/uvular; vocalic; reduplicated consonant babbling; and variegated consonant babbling. Comparison with infants of differing linguistic backgrounds indicated…

The proposed framework assumes six developmental stages according to mean length of utterance in morphemes. Within each stage, syntactic forms and semantic relations interact. In assessment, each utterance is analyzed for features which describe current language abilities. Language goals are developed based on existing and expected features.…

To test whether the critical language learning period applies to second languages, the English proficiency was studied of 46 Asians varying in age at which they moved to America. Results on a grammaticality judgment task support the hypothesis; early arrivals were significantly superior to later arrivals in English proficiency. (TJH)