Research supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.

The current state of and opportunities for basic research related to child and adolescent development are described in this report. The document was prepared as a resource for developing the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's 5-year plan of research for the years 1983-1987. Five broad areas of research are addressed: (1)…

The document contains 10 papers from the 1973 John Tracy Clinic (Los Angeles, California) Summer Session for teachers on communication skills for deaf/blind children. J. Efron, the author of "Teaching Communication Skills to Deaf/Blind Children--Which Method?" examines advantages and disadvantages of several methods of teaching communication…

The study was designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of diagnostic teaching with 70 children (6 to 14 years old) with learning and behavioral disorders and to investigate the administrative plan which is most efficient and effective for implementing diagnostic teaching. Ss were divided into three experimental groups--Experimental Group I with…

In l975, a longitudinal evaluation was begun of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program to determine its effects on children's cognitive and non-cognitive development. The population consisted of 5,000 disadvantaged 4-year-olds enrolled in the program. The study provides evidence that the program had a general effect, not…

This study used 152 grade eight students ranging in age from 12 to 14 years from a suburban middle school in central New Jersey. The investigations gave particular attention to the identification of variables that represent understanding of fundamental mathematical structures. The first year of the research took place during the 1978-1979 school…

To further investigate the relationship between divergent thinking and bilingualism, 23 Anglos and 108 Mexican Americans from a semi-rural West Texas community and 24 Mexican Americans from San Antonio, enrolled in the fourth grade, of low socioeconomic status, and with an average age of 10 years 6 months, were divided into 5 experimental groups,…

Developmental patterns in one mode of formal reasoning (probabilistic reasoning) were examined in this research study, specifically: (1) to determine if developmental patterns of probabilistic reasoning could be confirmed using a large, diverse sample of subjects, and if they could be similar despite variations in the complexity of the reasoning…

The Pennsylvania Preschool Inventory (PPI) was developed as a straight-forward and efficient measure of the relative cognitive development of the young child, offering an alternative to more complicated, elaborate assessment instruments. Results of the inventory are potentially relevant to both current and future school success of children between…

Presented are new principles and methods in the instruction of mathematics, with the primary focus at the elementary school level. The first half has the following sections: (1) The Influence of Environment on Child Behavior; (2) Pre-Mathematics; (3) The General and the Abstract; (4) The Passage from Pre-Math to Mathematics; (5) Building a…

Research indicates that the brain grows in spurts occurring every two years or so and alternating with plateau periods in which the gains due to growth are consolidated. While the number of brain cells no longer increases after the age of about 18 months, substantial increases in the complexity of neural networks occur generally between the ages…

This paper reports on two aspects of dyadic communication skills: verbal imitation, and response to questions and commands, as they relate to the development of semantic functions in three English-speaking children. The children, aged 16, 21 and 22 months, were unobtrusively videotaped during weekly free play sessions with their mothers. The…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in American-English work-initial stop consonants, as revealed through instrumental analysis of voice onset time characteristics. Four monolingual children were recorded at approximately two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provide…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…