Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

Focus is one factor that may account for children's use of single-word utterances after they have acquired the use of multi-word utterances. The possible role that focus may play in children's use of single-word utterances in naturalistic settings, after the acquisition of syntax, was investigated. (SW)

Ostensive definitions of words are ambiguities as to their referent. In a study of infant-mother dyads engaged in looking at picture books, 95 percent of ostensive definitions referred to the whole object depicted rather than parts, attributes, or actions. When parts were named, ambiguity was avoided by naming the part and the whole. (PJM)

If older children automatically label pictorial stimuli, then their performance should be impaired on tasks in which such labeling would increase the error rate. Children were asked to learn pairs of verbal or pictorial stimuli which, when combined, formed a different compound word (BUTTER-FLY). Subsequently, a false recognition test that included…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of verbal awareness training on the verbal behavior of student teachers in the field of social studies. (Author)

Discusses a study to determine the extent to which education results in enduring effects in the area of verbal skills. Research is based on a causal model of the enduring effects of education. Findings indicate that previous studies have seriously overestimated the enduring effects of education. (Author/DB)

This study attempted to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. When a discrimination list was given without rehearsal instructions, ability to discriminate situational frequencies predicted performance. Without rehearsal strategy, subjects' ability to discriminate between previous usage…

This investigation gives attention to the developmental course and influence of social class on self-directed, private speech. The Ss were 108 white, middle and lower class pre-school, first and third grade children. Two measures of receptive vocabulary were administered as background language measures. The experimental task required S to sort…

Reports on a child who evidently used a gestalt strategy (proceeding from the whole to the parts) in learning his first language. Further evidence for a gestalt strategy exists in the literature, albeit implicitly, and any theory of language or language acquisition should be able to account for it. (Author/KM)

The discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. (Author/BW)

THE LEARNING OF VERBALLY CONDITIONED MATERIAL WAS STUDIED TO CLARIFY SOME OF THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH SUCH LEARNING IS ACCOMPANIED BY THE USE OF HIGHER MENTAL PROCESSES, AND THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH IT IS NOT. THE STARTING POINT FOR THIS RESEARCH WAS THE PREMISE THAT LEARNING IN VERBAL CONDITIONING CAN OCCUR EITHER WITH OR WITHOUT AWARENESS ON…

The progressive inflection "-ing" appears to be the earliest verb inflection acquired by children learning English as their first language. Explanations are made on why the progressive is rarely, if ever, overgeneralized to inappropriate forms. (SW)

Investigates the development of past tense expressions in the speech of children from 1.6 to 2.6. It is shown that this development depends crucially on the child's cognitive construction of the time dimension, as described by Piaget. (Author/RM)

Children aged 6 to 13 years were given verbal and nonverbal fluency tasks and block design subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Results, providing normative data, showed that fluency tasks are age-, but not sex-dependent, and are modestly correlated to one another. (Author/CM)