The early linguistic environment of normal infants and children is discussed and research is applied to children who have severe and profound handicaps. (BD)

Pronoun mastery demands a knowledge of speech roles and an ability to identify oneself and others in those roles. Twenty-one girls' knowledge of "my,""your," and "her" was assessed when they were speakers, addressees, and nonaddressed listeners. The children were aware of speech roles only when they themselves occupied these roles. (PJM)

The hypothesis explains the early lexical development of children and the predictions of this hypothesis are shown to be consistent with available data on overextension. (Author/NCR)

Research supported by a grant from the Defense Research Board of Canada. (DS)

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

This article discusses children's phonological limitations, including perceptual difficulties and productive difficulties. (NCR)

This paper reports on an experiment designed to collect data on children's perception and use of semantic attributes. Forty-five children ranging in age from 2 years 8 months to 6 years were given a picture test involving judgment of similarities between objects. The test consisted of 47 groups of pictures; each group contained a stimulus or a…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the view that the language a person speaks influences his perception of the world. This hypothesis is frequently misunderstood to be a question of the influence of language on culture, when in reality it emphasizes the influence of language on the cognition of its speakers. This distinction between culture…

The author reviews findings in perception, cognition, psycholinguistics, and motivation, concentrating on the development of these processes in the nonreading and beginning reading child rather than in the mature processes of a skilled reader. She offers the following conclusions: (1) Research in perception suggests that there are developmental…

Fourteen two-year-olds were presented with minimal word pairs in a new and efficient experimental perception paradigm. Data provide a view of relative difficulty of various minimal phonological contrasts for children. (CHK)

A decline exists in children's ability at ages 4 and 5 to accurately respond to the difference between polar adjectives such as "big" and "tall.""Taller" and "bigger" are both taken to mean "having a higher top point," rather than "bigger" meaning "greater overall mass." Two hypotheses are put forth to explain this. The "strong cognitive…

Findings of this Israeli study suggest that perception is affected by lables, learning, and selective attention; that these effects are determined developmentally; and that as age increases, the effects of verbal cues diminish, while the effects of perceptual cues increase. (Author/DLS)

In the first part of the paper the idea of the cognitive network is developed. The network consists of concepts linked together by relationships which are themselves concepts. Concepts are learned according to simple rules, and the network grows as new concepts are learned. Part II considers the growth and structure of language. The growth of…

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) whether there is a developmental sequence in children's acquisition of metalinguistic abilities and (2) whether the acquisition of these abilities is related to Piagetian operations. Word awareness served as the measure of metalinguistic ability. An attempt was also made to determine whether the…