Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

Background: Early intervention for children identified as late talkers (LTs) at the age of 24 months is still a controversial issue in research and clinical routine. Previous studies have shown inconsistent results regarding predictors of early lexical deficits on school-age outcomes of late-talking toddlers. Methods: In a five-wave follow-up…

Most of us recall with pain the unpleasant experiences associated with the teacher's announcement that we would once again initiate a unit of learning designed to both widen and deepen our knowledge of the words of our language. This was said to establish the foundation for all of our future academic pursuits. A strong vocabulary was said to be a…

Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research…

Ideally, one's talk segues into ways the precision of crafted phrases or stylized sentences amplifies messages, sharpens concerns, or frames praise. People pursue how words and their selective combinations illuminate and illustrate, persuade and perplex. For many, this intricate puzzle with language is a frolic, simple wordplay. In this article,…

Among 128 girls attending a private day school in Australia, it was found that changes in semantic aspects of language which occur at the formal operational stage appear to be related to whether a child is classified at the formal operational level on a pendulum problem. (RH)

Presents a study of the effects of training 18 subjects, 28-40 months, in the use of two-word subject-verb utterances. The study focused on: (1) the number of different semantic relations underlying the subject-verb form in which the child is trained, and (2) the relationship between the semantic relations and ongoing, experimentally manipulated…

A METHOD OF VOCABULARY STUDY USED AS A TOOL RATHER THAN AS A COMPLETE VOCABULARY PROGRAM HELPS STUDENTS INVESTIGATE ANY WORD AND HELPS CLARIFY KEY OR DIFFICULT WORDS IN AN ASSIGNMENT. THE SEMANTIC LEVELS OF DEFINITION-MAKING ARE EXPLAINED AND ILLUSTRATED BY THE TEACHER'S ASKING THE STUDENTS WHAT CLASS OF THINGS A CERTAIN WORD STANDS FOR AND HOW…

Correlation of a film to a work of literature helps students develop greater sensitivity to each, and a sharper awareness of the relationship between the two. (Author)

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

When sound takes on meaning for the first time in the life of a child, a giant and prototypic step in the development of his symbolic capacities has taken place. This step is worthy of careful scientific scrutiny. This paper seeks first to describe the steps by which the author's child discovered the existence of meaning in sound, and second, to…

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)