Examines the relationship between the development of fine motor control for articulation and the development of fine motor control in other muscle systems. Discusses whether the late appearance of /r/ and /1/ is due to the fact that their articulation requires finer motor coordination than other classes of sounds. (EKN)

Discusses recent research highlighting both the child's growth as a reflective language user and the school's capacity to enhance or hamper that growth. The research is concerned with the need for children eventually to use language in decontextualized ways, without the supporting context of visible or manipulable objects or actions. (HTH)

Differential attention of two-month-old infants to synthetically generated and naturally produced rising and falling intonation contours was studied, and it was learned that infants attended more to naturally produced rising contours and synthetically generated falling contours. Use of the infant-control auditory preference paradigm was also…

Findings include (1) comprehension of 'this,''that,''here,' and 'there' depends on the role the comprehender plays in the conversation and (2) 'this' and 'here' are more difficult to comprehend that 'that' and 'there.' (EKN)

Argues that knowing how infants process speech is a prerequisite to any definition of linguistic experience and therefore, the discrimination paradigm does not provide a test for the effect of experience on infants' speech discrimination. Outlines conditions to be met in order to conclude an effect of experience. (EKN)

Investigates in an experimental setting the claim that young children have some knowledge of the rules of correspondence between language and reality which are central to propositional logic. (EKN)

Examines requests and responses of first-grade children in peer reading groups and concludes that children differ in the variety and complexity of their requests. (FL)

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Discusses the constructs of decentration and reading achievement; summarizes related research findings. Reports a study of the relationship between children's abilities to use decentered spoken language and reading achievement. Found significant correlations between egocentric spoken language and reading achievement scores for children in grades 2…

Presents study designed to investigate production of certain structures in French by native-speaking French Canadian children using the Bilingual Syntax Measure. Data show no difference in production for structures studied across ages; however, significant difference was found in extent to which structures were produced correctly. (Author/BK)

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Outlining a study of 53 children (grades K-1), this report notes the difficulties children have in communicating information by retelling a story. Typical errors made by the children are cited. Children's inability to judge the clarity of others' stories and to describe the storyteller's role are also discussed. (Author/SJL)

Presents a system for coding and analyzing dialogue involving preschool age children. Each participant assumes roles of initiator and responder and is evaluated according to different scales. Illustrates the system through recorded dialogue between mothers and their three-year-old daughters. (Author/BK)