Discusses the use of story retelling as an instructional strategy, describing its potential benefits, including improvement in reading comprehension, use of oral language, and memory. (ARH)

Three experiments demonstrate that children four to ten years old, when presented with a series recall task with pictures of common objects having short or long names, showed consistently better recall of pictures with short names. (HOD)

Reviews the proceedings of a 1971 conference on the relationships between speech and learning to read, and discusses related literature and research under these topics: acquisition of speech and reading, the deaf child's language acquisition, orthography and linguistic awareness, reading maturity and age: short-term memory, and attaining fluent…

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child. (Author/RM)

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…

Examined phonological short-term memory and new word learning in 5-year olds. Found that learning sound structures of new words was significantly, and to some degree independently, associated with aspects of phonological memory skill and vocabulary knowledge. Learning of familiar word pairs was linked with current vocabulary knowledge, not with…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

This study investigated the relationships obtained among verbal imitation, comprehension, and production when a stimulus sentence exceeded the child's short term memory. A total of 32 children, aged 3 to 5 years, took tests of comprehension, nonverbal imitation, verbal imitation, and production of structures expressing sequence ("before", "after",…

Three- to ten-year-olds responded to a three-dimensional object by drawing it and/or verbally describing it. Two days later, they reconstructed the object in drawn or verbal form. Descriptive abilities increased with age. The children displayed differences in verbal and graphic description only when recalling the object from memory. (Author/RM)

The speech children spontaneously quote was examined in 2 studies involving personal narratives from 96 children aged 4 to 9 and speech in 25 children aged 1 to 5. Findings showed that frequency of reported speech increased with age and direct quotation was more common than indirect or summarized quotations at all ages. (57 references) (Author/LB)

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…

This curriculum guide provides a variety of activities to develop perceptual skills in young children. Activities in the following areas are provided: (1) motor skills--awareness of self, gross motor, fine motor, orientation in space, eye motor; (2) auditory skills--attention, listening, discrimination, imitation and articulation, auditory…

Examined the effect over time of the use of sign language in a two-year period, including preschool and ending with kindergarten, on hearing children's language development. Found vocabulary gains, no evidence of memory decay over time, and positive evidence for inclusion of sign language instruction in early childhood education. (SD)