Research is reported which investigated the ability of four-month-old hearing infants to discriminate between gestures derived from American Sign Language. Findings show that infants possess the perceptual abilities to differentiate between signs that differ solely in terms of contrasts along a single underlying movement direction. (SED)

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…

In 1964, the author proposed a multisensory approach to reading, and reading was seen as a language skill related to the development of verbal symbolic behavior. A closer focus was permitted on the child's learning process, which consists of preverbal learning (perceptually automatized and subconsciously acquired) and conceptual learning (which is…

Smith (1973), Stampe (1972), and Braine (1973) believe that by the time the child speaks his perception is well-developed, and that any discrepancy between child forms and adult forms are due to organizational and production difficulties. Other linguists believe immature perception determines the form of child speech. This paper suggests that…

A class of preschoolers, aged 44-63 months and grouped according to age, sex, sibling position, family size and the occupation of each parent, were the subjects of a 2-part study to examine preschoolers' perceptions of mothers. In the first part of the study, each child was shown 4 sets of pictures depicting a variety of possible mother figures.…

Several studies have begun to investigate the claim that children can make most phonological discriminations when they begin to speak. This paper investigates how well children aged 2;3 to 2;11 can discriminate between pairs of minimally different real words, and it shows that the results are affected by how well the children know the words. It is…