Twenty dyads--ten middle-class mothers and ten lower-class mothers and their two-year-old children--were videotaped in a play situation. Variables in speech and utterance production were examined for change across condition (awareness or ignorance of being observed) and across socioeconomic class within condition. The number of utterances was…

Forty-three children, 2;11 to 5;6, described six familiar activities: making cookies, going to the grocery, having a birthday party, going to a restaurant, getting dressed, and having a fire drill. They described each event three times. The descriptions were elicited by initially asking "What happens when...?" or "What do you do when...?" and then…

Preschoolers' ability to understand grammatical relations in passives and to generalize was studied using animate referents. Three- to five-year-old children were taught to produce passive sentence descriptions of events in which animacy of the actor and acted-on object were varied. After pretesting to determine passive sentence comprehension, the…

Two possible iconic models of the acquisition of verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL) are developed and contrasted with a third, morphological account of the acquisition of this aspect of ASL. Additionally, data from spontaneous conversation of deaf children who have deaf parents are considered to test these three models. An iconic model…

Questions centered on the issue of how young children and others deal with gender and qustions focusing on gender development and developmental theory are posed. Numerous research findings bearing on the questions are reviewed. General topics addressed are the following: (1) classificatory discrimination of sex by physical cues, (2) gender…

The data in this study are taken from an on-going research project investigating the development of the production of intervocalic consonants in Mexican Spanish. The total project includes both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of forty children and uses both naturalistic observation and experimental methods. The data discussed here is from…

Early child phonology was studied using phonetically transcribed samples that six parents provided of their children's vocalizations, beginning when the children were about 11 months old and continuing to four years of age. The primary study objective was to obtain a sufficient amount of longitudinal data from several children to support a…

This paper investigates the influence childhood bilingualism has on adult foreign language learning ability. Early research exploring the influence of bilingualism on general intelligence is mentioned as well as recent studies that present more favorable results. It is hypothesized that childhood bilingualism will have a positive effect on adult…

To find an area of weakness in disabled readers that might profitably be strengthened, the level of language development of disabled secondary readers was compared with that of competent secondary readers. The group of disabled readers used in the study consisted of 20 high school students in a corrective reading class; the comparison group…

The failure of many beginning reading students to become efficient or enthusiastic readers is due to mistaken views of the reading process that cause teachers to stress isolated reading skills and error-free oral reading, rather than focusing on children's ability to read with understanding. Teachers who want to teach differently must take an…

The importance of parental attention in the facilitation of prereading skill development is examined in this paper. The first section presents a historical perspective on attitudes toward early childhood education, touching on the views of educators of past centuries and on recent trends in early childhood education in the United States. The…

The use of locative prepositions in the spontaneous speech of 30 Hebrew speaking children two to three years old was studied. The rank order of locative prepositions is determined according to the correct use in obligatory contexts, and tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the order of acquisition of these terms in Hebrew. An attempt is made…

This study attempts to assess the developmental psycholinguistics hypothesis that language acquisition strategies are universal. Four types of statements were focused upon: (1) true affirmative statements (e.g., "You are a child"), (2) false affirmative statements ("You are a baby"), (3) false negative statements ("You aren't a child"), and (4)…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

Designed to explore new reading readiness predictors that are not found extensively in the more commonly used commercial group tests and to develop new indices to measure the level of reading readiness of beginning first graders, a study was undertaken involving 115 children. The factor of sex in reading readiness was also investigated. An…