In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

This study longitudinally investigated developmental changes in the frame of reference used by children in their gestures and speech. Fifteen children, between 4 and 6 years of age, were asked once a year to describe their route home from their nursery school. When the children were 4 years old, they tended to produce gestures that directly and…

Results of two experiments support these hypotheses: 1) children tend to treat contradictions and tautologies as empirical statements, due to their nonempirical character, not merely to the logical words occurring in them; and 2) the ability to examine language objectively is necessary for the ability to correctly evaluate nonempirical statements.…

Outlines a theory of metaphor that posits varying levels of semantic processing and formalizes the levels in terms of kinds of semantic mapping operators. Predicted complexity of semantic mapping operators was tested using metaphor interpretations of 204 children aged 6-12 years and 24 adults. Processing score increased predictably with age. (SAK)

This paper reports eight experiments with elementary school children and college students concerning the form class effect. Results confirmed several predictions regarding the effects on recall of enhanced organization between pairs of nouns by verb connectives versus conjunction connectives. (Author/JMB)

Boys (n=800) between the ages of seven and twelve were administered 35 problems for three successive years. Each problem was characterized according to its logical structure and language which corresponded to a pictorial presentation, its ordinary verbal language, and its abstract symbols. Each structure was presented in each of the three…

Aspects of the processing of frequency information were investigated in two studies. The first showed that second graders were as prepared to process frequency differences as adults. The second showed that practice at frequency counting does not improve the performance of young adults and neither does feedback regarding earlier performance.…

Data are reported and interpreted involving language imitation, comprehension, and free production of two English dialects. Results indicate that the two dialect systems function behaviorally as separate cognitive systems. (ST)

Relational-inference, a process associated with developmental change in performance on classification items, was investigated in two experiments. The accuracy and latency with which 20 subjects at each of 3 age levels (8, 11, and adult) stated relationships among concepts were tested. In experiment 1, 40 triplets of concepts related by a class…

Experiments are reported in which semantically interrelating sentences were presented to subjects as discrete items, and inference tests were given to measure the degree to which the similar information had been stored in the same memory system. Results suggest that verbal information is sometimes encoded into an episodic system. (Author/RM)

Four conference papers on discourse are included. In "How Context Contributes to the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions," Carlota S. Smith provides a summary analysis of the temporal interpretation of English sentences. Many sentences are shown to be semantically incomplete; it is argued that information from neighboring sentences is…

The relationship between mathematics performance and fundamental linguistic variations in the cognitive representation of numbers was assessed, using 24 first graders each from the United States and Japan. Results indicate that the Japanese cognitive representation of number positively affects the understanding of place value. No gender…

This paper reports on a study undertaken to investigate the relationship between elicited imitation data and comprehension data, as measured by a picture-identification task and a second language (L2) to first language (L1) translation task, and between elicited imitation data and production data, as measured by a spontaneous production task and…