Forty third-graders and an equal number of sixth-graders listened to a list of words and for each word had to indicate, by saying "old" or "new," whether it had appeared before on the list or not. The subjects gave more erroneous "old" responses to words which were semantically or phonetically related to previously heard words than to control…

This investigation gives attention to the developmental course and influence of social class on self-directed, private speech. The Ss were 108 white, middle and lower class pre-school, first and third grade children. Two measures of receptive vocabulary were administered as background language measures. The experimental task required S to sort…

Each of the three chapters in this dissertation is a separate consideration of one aspect of language acquisition by Tenejapa Tzeltal children. Chapter I places the specification of input sources and contexts in a matrix of the ethnographic description of the childhood portion of the life cycle in Tenejapa. Beliefs and practices that have a direct…

Four major areas of research into verbal development are discussed: (1) the relationships between behaviors hypothesized to be associated with one of the four major language skills, (2) the sequencing or ordering of behaviors within a skill, (3) the relationships between behaviors associated with different skills, and (4) the relationships between…

Part One of this book deals with theoretical considerations in the cross-national comparisons of language and reading instruction and achievement. Discussions of the scope and methodological problems of such research, bases for comparison, attitudinal and cultural variations, teacher preparation and organization variables, the varied linguistic…

Sex differences in language development were studied. Protocols from 54 children, aged 2;0 to 4;2, were analyzed with Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) as the independent variable. When MLU's reached 3.75 to 4.0, differences began to favor girls. Results are discussed in terms of a social learning model and a cognitive model. (Author)

The 17-month (1967-1968) study summarized in this report concerned experimental analysis of the verbal behavior of disadvantaged preschool children (an interracial group of 28, ranging in age from 30 months to 42 months). Research was conducted in the verbal behavior laboratory at the University of Rochester and in a remodeled private home in a…

The relation of imaginative play to psycholinguistic development was investigated in a sample of disadvantaged preschool children. The children were assigned to high and low play groups based on their level of play organization. The high play group engaged in more task-relevant speech during play than did the low play group. (Author)

The nature of early games and how they might assist the infant in language acquisition were explored in a longitudinal study of two mother-infant dyads, using video-recordings of their free play. The analysis of appearance and disappearance games was particularly revealing. (EJS)

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)

Reports on a child who evidently used a gestalt strategy (proceeding from the whole to the parts) in learning his first language. Further evidence for a gestalt strategy exists in the literature, albeit implicitly, and any theory of language or language acquisition should be able to account for it. (Author/KM)

This paper represents a partial condensation of the results of a study covering 14 months in a Russian-speaking child's phonological development. Evidence supports a theory of phonological acquisition formulated by Olmsted (1971), and offers detailed information on the child's acquisition of specific phones. (CHK)

Fifteen monozygotic and 22 dizygotic twin pairs, who were found to be lower in verbal ability than matched singletons at age two years, were compared at age nine years. Although twins still showed lower verbal ability, more variance in verbal ability was accounted for by the mothers' education and birth weight than by being a twin. (SLD)

The persistence of individual differences in phonological development of 10 normally developing children observed at age one and again at age three was studied. The children differed considerably in rate of vocabulary acquisition and relative phonological maturity and also in their general approach to learning. (Author/JDD)

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)