After taking base rate measures of verbal behavior, using a specially devised Story Telling Test and selected sub-tests from the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, 34 children with a mean age of 4-4, attending a year-round Head Start program, were assigned to matched experimental and control groups. The children in the experimental group…

A practicum study, recognizing the expressive language delays of inner-city kindergarten children, implemented two strategies to increase their expressive language ability and their mean length of utterance. The target population, 14 kindergarten students who demonstrated vocabulary development delays on the Brigance Kindergarten Screening Test,…

One of the most remarkable aspects of the babbling of some babies is that it is produced with intonation contours that sound very much like adult sentence melodies. This study reviews the literature and examines longitudinal data collected from seven children. Some of the non-adult-like syntactic uses made of intonation by children for…

This guide to a total developmental language program for kindergarten is divided into three sections: (1) Helpful Hints to the Teacher, (2) Expanding Verbal Power, and (3) Linking Language and Thought. Subjects in Section 2 include hearing and speaking clearly, increasing vocabulary, extending meaning, expanding language patterns, conveying ideas,…

This paper describes the development and use of language training procedures, referred to as cues-pause-point procedures, that rely on behavioral principles and simple and natural teaching procedures and that are exhibited in many normal parent-child or teacher-student verbal interactions. The procedures have been effective in teaching severely…

This analysis of Brazilian baby talk (BT) includes data from two sources: elicitations of the use of BT from three mothers, all of whom have university degrees, and observations of adult-child interactions in the home. The data shows Ferguson's modified list of thirty lexical items that frequently have BT forms in various languages and the…