This study of the acquisition of kinship terms in English is a test of the hypothesis that lexical items are learned in their order of complexity and of the validity of relational analysis in predicting the order of the acquisition of kinship terms. Earlier studies of kinship terms, Piaget's in particular, are first discussed, as well as the…

This paper reviews the psychological theories and research which deal with the meaning of words in the course of human psychological development. The three major premises of the review are: (1) that word meaning is conducive to empirical study, (2) that rules can be produced that apply to most word meanings, and (3) that human development has…

This handbook contains 35 brief activity guides designed to be used by parents at home with their 4-year-old children in conjunction with the Saturday School Program. The aim of the Home Phase of the program is to provide learning experiences in two ways: (1) through Home Teaching Visits involving the Saturday School teacher, neighborhood children…

The contents of this book are organized in three main sections: Part 1, "Beginnings," includes three papers: "Some sociological determinants of perception,""A public language: some sociological implications of a linguistic form," and "Language and social class." Part 2, "Developments," includes four papers: "A review of 'The Lore and Language of…

Presented are approximately 110 lesson plans for six mental age levels (from 0-9 months to 3 1/2-4 1/2 years) to teach language, gross motor skills, and manipulative skills to severely and profoundly retarded children. Provided for each lesson is information on the experience area (whether motor or language), the dominant modality used, materials…

A new language-processing system, CONSTRUCT, is described and defined as a question-answering system for elementary mathematical language using natural language input. The primary goal is said to be an attempt to reach a better understanding of the relationship between syntactic and semantic components of natural language. The "meaning…

This paper proposes the establishment of a mini-media center in all middle school English programs. A mini-media center is defined as a planned set of materials which involves students who fashion it as learners and as creators of materials and who serve as mediators between what has been learned and created and what other students may learn by…

Investigated in the first of two studies on verbal elaboration in special populations (learning problem and retarded children) were the effects of paragraph elaboration on the paired-associate and reversal learning of 137 brain-injured and familial educable mentally retarded children 8- to 13-years-old. The relationship between brain-injury…

This is the second report concerned with the analysis of a young child's spoken French. It focuses on the study of the entire corpus of 33 hour sessions occurring approximately once a week and ranging from the time the subject was 25 months old to 38 months old. Chapter 1 is devoted to introductory remarks. Chapter 2 contains a dictionary of the…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of initial consonants, especially /s/, on the pluralization of English nouns by both native English- and native Spanish-speaking first grade pupils. A test instrument consisting of nonsense syllable trigrams was constructed based on linguistic descriptions of English noun pluralization.…

This study attempted to ameliorate the educational deficits of infants using structured tutorial programs of language and concept training in the home. It was part of a larger project whose purpose was to determine the age at which intervention will produce maximum acceleration of cognitive development. Subjects were 20 disadvantaged 8- and…

Twenty mothers of culturally disadvantaged children took part in a program of self-help which was both child- and mother-centered. Two groups of ten mothers each met weekly with two staff members over an 8-month period and were trained to tutor their infants (1 to 2-years-old) in their homes. Fifteen of the initial 20 mothers remained in the…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) if there are sex differences in language development among children growing up in the deprived conditions of a large city and (2) if there is a significant vocabulary change in these children throughout the Head Start school year. The subjects, 52 girls and 66 boys (3 and 4 years of age) from four…

Samples of written language were collected from 140 congenitally deaf children at grade levels 3, 5, 7, and 9. The samples were then subjected to error, quantitative, and transformational analysis. Findings suggested a relationship between the order in which the deaf child acquires the rules of his language and the ordering of rules in a…

To produce and evaluate a language development program for culturally deprived preschool children based on characteristics of Piaget's theory of intelligence, a 6-week experimental study was carried out in Project Headstart, Starkville, Mississippi. Randomly-selected, 45 Negro Headstart enrollees made up three groups--two were taught the…