Showed that in a task requiring judgments about the concept of "more" based on the relative numerosity of sets, three- to four-year-old children may base their judgments on such parameters as the extent to which the sets are homogeneous with respect to the color of their components. (Author/DB)

An examination of studies concerning the functional organization of languages in the bilingual brain discusses several variables. Factors that may contribute to the organization of language include age, language proficiency, literacy, reading skills, type of script, language specific factors, social acculturation, teaching method, and style. (CJ)

Three media used in a longitudinal, cross-sectional investigation to determine the rate of artistic development in young children were clay modeling, drawing, and storytelling. The most significant result of the study reveals that artistic competence does not proceed upward across all media as the child matures. (JN)

Discusses two studies of English speakers' understanding of the English spelling system. Comparative analysis suggests that seven-year-olds are as sophisticated as adults in extracting many of the linguistic factors which influence stress assignment, but they lack the "heterogeneous" structure of the lexicon that is characteristic of the…

Presents data supporting the belief that reading stories to children is particularly beneficial and explains that hearing stories read aloud familiarizes children with the language of books and with the characteristic narrative structures they will meet in school. (JL)

Teachers can deal with language disordered children through discourse analysis, a conversational teaching process aimed at getting children to talk. Steps include selecting a topic to talk about during the remedial language session, having teacher and child take turns talking about the topic, using requests to constrain the child's responses so…

The author describes ACT (Acting Out Central Theme), a method for dealing with psychomotor, cognitive, and affective domains in slow readers. The ACT approach involves three sessions which focus on discussion of a theme such as friendship, presentaton of the theme as a skit, and assignment of topics to individual students. (SW)

Three experiments examined the perception of a three-way voicing contrast by monolingual speakers of English. The results demonstrate that the perceptual mechanisms used by adults in categorizing stop consonants can be modified easily with simple laboratory techniques in a short period of time. (Author/PN)

A noncategorical preschool program for handicapped children employs two language-intervention methods: a precision method in which groupings are made by ability level and data-taking procedures are emphasized; and an experiential method which involves pretesting and posttesting but provides groupings across all ability levels. (CL)

Reports a longitudinal investigation of family interaction variables and language development measured during preschool and again during the primary grades. In Black families of low income, preschool siblings (24 - 42 months of age) of second graders in two contrasting levels of reading achievement were observed in their homes. (Author/RH)

Examines five biliterate (reading/writing mastery in two languages) educational settings for their functional approaches to language instruction and their different teaching methods. Notes the implications of such examinations and comparisons regarding regular English instruction and teaching English to speakers of other languages. (RL)

Illustrates how children constantly solve communication puzzles in the course of language acquisition and offers suggestions for teachers and parents to assist children in their understanding of language. (HTH)

In a small experiment, normal and educationally subnormal primary children had no difficulty making negative referential descriptions in natural contexts, when their attention was drawn to the context by the experimenter. Awareness of context related to mental maturity, and there was a developmental trend in descriptive forms. (Author/SJL)

Studies the simultaneous language development in American Sign Language and spoken English by a hearing girl. Findings show: (1) a mixture of oral and manual babbling, (2) a code-switching ability across modalities, and (3) a single syntactic system incorporating rules from both languages but with two separate lexicons. (Author/PJM)

Describes a language program designed to allow a 4-year old autistic child to acquire skill across a variety of sentence types. Training focused on teaching combinatorial and semantic properties of grammatical morphemes, thus enabling the child to use sentences, instead of single words and rote phrases. (Author/PJM)