Describing what children at the preoperational stage know about writing, spelling, and words, the authors make specific recommendations for ways language arts teachers can build instruction that is based on this knowledge. (SK)

Seventy percent of the children (non-conservers in length) who had to respond to length equality as opposed to inequality made the correct invariance judgment and could characterize their choices in invariance language, while still failing the standard verbal task in which the experimenter used such phrases. (Author/SJL)

Forty preschoolers performed a sentence imitation task under four conditions: immediate or delayed imitation of auditorily presented stimuli or immediate or delayed imitation of auditorily and pictorially presented stimuli. Immediate imitation subjects produced fewer total errors and more verbatim responses than did delay interval subjects.…

Five educational leaders--John Downing, Richard E. Hodges, Charlton Laird, Pose Lamb, and Roy C. O'Donnell--offer reflections on significant developments in research on language development during the 1970s and on their hopes for language research and instruction in the 1980s. (GT)

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

Studies the acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and demonstrative suffixes in Dutch. Native-speaking and second language learning children were studied. Both groups showed acquisition orders for plural and agentive, and the second-language group showed interference in acquiring the agentive. Morphological acquisition thus…

The acquisition and use of locative prepositions by 30 Hebrew-speaking children aged two to three years was investigated in a cross-sectional study. Both the order of acquisition and the role of linguistic complexity in determining that order were examined. (Author/AM)

Three studies assessed children's knowledge of the wh question modal auxiliary placement rule by asking the children to imitate (and in Study 3 judge) grammatical and ungrammatical model wh questions. (Author/MP)

Preschool children aged 2.6 to 5.0 were presented with reversible active and passive sentences in four comprehension test settings. The children's response patterns were analyzed in terms of individual response patterns. Extralinguistic cues accounted for the most common patterns. (Author/AM)

Brown's (1979) assertion that frequency of input is not a significant variable in language acquisition was evaluated through a reanalysis of Brown's data. Frequency of parental speech input was found to be highly related to frequency of production. (Author/AM)

Suggests practical ways of teaching functional communication on the elementary level. This approach provided opportunities for students to practice communication skills in exercise settings. Recommends a sequence of activities for teachers: observe patterns of child communication, isolate communication functions, design instructional objectives,…

Evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that informal and formal environments contribute to different aspects of second language competence, the former affecting acquired competence and the latter affecting learned competence. Data is presented that suggests that the classroom can be used simultaneously as a formal and informal linguistic…

This article discusses the problems encountered by second language learners in mastering the phonology of the target language, and suggests the use of music in second language teaching, particularly for intonation. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Describes several techniques of informal assessment which might supplement test results. (DD)

This study aimed to determine the average ages at which children imitate, produce and comprehend passive constructions. Previous findings that imitation precedes comprehension, which precedes production, are confirmed in this study for children aged 3-8. (CHK)