The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…

These forty conference papers deal with a wide variety of new approaches to the application of developmental theory. The papers represent a cross-section of current research methodology and techniques used to evaluate such traditional Piagetian topics as concrete and formal operations, conservation, classification skills, language development,…

Concern about typical early identification procedures used with kindergarten children to predict potential reading failure is expressed in this paper. A diagnostic procedure for screening kindergarten children and then prescribing an individualized program for each child is described. The screening battery--Prediction with Diagnostic Qualities…

Speech discrimination by 12 children aged about 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years was tested, using the discrimination learning procedure of Shvachkin's 1948 Russian study. Recent work on the acquisition of syntax and semantics shows an ordered acquisition for linguistic items; this pilot study was to test whether the ability to discriminate between consonants…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

This study focuses on the significance of specific maternal language teaching techniques in the early language development of the child. A recording was made of the verbal and nonverbal interactions in 20 mother-child dyads during a one-hour session in the home. The linguistic level for each of the children, who ranged from 1.9 to 5.0 years in…

The main purposes of this handbook are to present a series of activities and performance goals intended to improve the English program in Baltimore County; to establish the basic language skills and experiences that all students at each grade level should have; and to suggest a number of methods and procedures for implementing these learning…

Fricatives and affricates in different word positions and initial fricative clusters were elicited from three linguistically deviant children (ages five years, two months to seven years) and one normal child (age two years, nine months) by means of pictures depicting familiar objects. Data from two of the older children and the normal child are…

This 24-item annotated bibliography is intended to facilitate introduction to the field of sign language studies. It lists selected published works in English in which sign language is viewed from several different aspects, including: theoretical studies (nos. 1, 5, 6, 19, 20 and 21); works relating Sign to other visual communication systems (nos.…

The primary focus of this paper is on black children and the relationship between their productive and receptive language competencies. The solutions which have been proposed to solve the dilemma of black pupils' poor reading achievement are discussed. It is noted that none of the proposed solutions has the unqualified support provided by a mass…

This discussion on spelling and phonics focuses on beginning reading vocabulary (phonology and graphemics of high utility words), factors in word perception (their recognition in teaching word perception skills), premises and principles of phonics (their relation to curriculum content and to methods), phonic rules or spelling patterns (their…

The program described in this book enables children and adults to spell 96 percent of the words they use correctly, to develop a spelling conscience and the necessary dictionary skills to enable correct spelling of the remaining 4 percent, and to provide the encouragement and practice that will lead to skill and enjoyment in manipulating language.…

This report, covering the period of January 1 to June 30, 1976, is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The manuscripts and extended reports contained in this report include "Exploring the Relations between Reading and…

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of…

Studies of bilingual infants are in disagreement as to the point at which the child distinguishes two languages in his linguistic environment. In this paper, data from two classic works by linguist-parents on bilingual infants are compared with data collected from the author's own bilingual daughter. Five types of behavior are described which…