This study compared multiple characteristics of girls' and boys' vocabulary in 6 different linguistic communities--1 urban and 1 rural setting in each of 3 countries. Two hundred fifty-two mothers in Argentina, Italy, and the United States completed vocabulary checklists for their 20-month-old children. Individual variability was substantial…

Despite American schools administrators' refusal to accept the language of African-American students and their overzealousness to frame language and literacy skills in terms of an "achievement gap," African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the language of African-American imagination and reality. This article discusses the characteristics of…

The profiles and developmental trajectories of adaptive behavior were cross-sectionally examined in 80 children with Down syndrome ages 1 to 11.5 years using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. Profile findings indicated a significant weakness in communication relative to daily living and socialization skills. Within communication itself,…

Purpose: This qualitative study explored mothers' perceptions of their children's communication disabilities, emergent literacy development, and speech-language therapy programs. Method: Participants were 14 Mexican immigrant mothers and their children (age 17-47 months) who were receiving center-based services from an early childhood intervention…

A study examined mothers' accuracy in predicting the responses their children would give and the scores they would achieve on two standardized vocabulary tests. Specifically, the study's primary purpose was to examine maternal estimates of both expressive and receptive vocabulary skills according to two indices: accuracy of total score and…

An assessment battery, measuring multiple aspects of language, was administered to 29 children between 4 and 5 years of age who had been born prematurely. The children, who weighed less than 2,500 grams at birth after less than 37 weeks of gestation, were recruited from a cohort of children originally admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit…

Based on constructivist theory (emphasizing meaning generation rather than communication), the study described in this report clarifies and elaborates on the definition of the term "expressive writing." First, the paper offers a rationale for the study and a discussion of the research methodology, which combined analysis of texts and…

Eighteen people (with ages ranging from 7 to 22 years) who had been diagnosed as aphasic 10 years previously were assessed in terms of current functioning to test the hypothesis that, since the subjects had a specific language disorder, other areas of adaptive development should be relatively spared, and communication scores should be…

This study used several measures to compare 40 toddlers with delays in expressive language and 40 children acquiring language normally. Findings indicated that children with small expressive vocabularies at 2 years of age are not different from their normally speaking peers in terms of hearing, history of ear infections, birth order, or pre- or…

As part of an investigation of ways to increase the linguistic awareness and communication skills of community college students from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, a study was conducted to determine if poetry study would enhance the word comprehension sensitivity of bilingual and bidialectal students. The 38 students involved in…

The reading habits by which students formulate a critical analysis of a literary work should focus attention on the choices that a writer makes when putting words on paper. These choices include sound, diction, language, imagery, organization, metaphors, sentence structure, transitions, allusions, and patterns. Discussing these choices does not…

This pamphlet is the last in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. It contains a discussion of some of the theoretical positions…

The objective of this study was to develop a highly reliable instrument for primary grade students which was relatively culture free and could accurately identify each child's dominant language. In addition, it should provide normative data regarding the child's fluency in his two most predominant languages. This test, known as the Test of…

Videotapes of a deaf child of deaf parents were used to study the developmental stages and underlying processes involved in the child's acquisition of negation from age 28 months to age 41 months. The S was videotaped in spontaneous interaction with her mother or the experimenter for approximately 1 hour each month, and the films were transcribed…

Preschool readiness measures were secured on 35 pairs of disadvantaged 2- to 3-year-old lower SES black children, representing large and small families, to determine the impact of family size on readiness profiles. The findings reveal that blacks from small families achieved significantly higher scores on 3 of the 9 skill areas: Visual Memory,…