Examined effects of direct intervention on language learning. Using a toy manipulation task, 18 children aged 3;6 to 4;6 were systematically taught linguistic structures beyond their developmental grasp. Solid improvement was found in the experimental conditions; no significant improvement was noted in control conditions, showing that the language…

Argues that bicultural education is necessary in meeting the language needs of Mexican-American students. (RB)

Two tasks were used to test predictions of the Semantic Feature Hypothesis (SFH) about children's comprehension of the meaning of spatial adjectives. Predictions about acquisition order for dimensional features were supported; predictions about polarity were not. An acquisition hypothesis is offered that is contrary to the SFH. (Author/RM)

The use of the verbs "go" and "come" was examined in the spontaneous speech of seven two-year-olds. As verbs of motion, the words were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This is considered crucial in explaining children's difficulty in discriminating the verbs in…

People explore their world in many ways: they observe, they read, they ponder, they write, they listen. They also turn to others and intentionally engage them in their own attempts to understand. It is this turning-to-others that is the focus of this book, with reference to children. An act of inquiry is defined in the book as "a language act…

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

Describes a program geared to helping children learn to attach the verbal symbol to its particular motoric response so the child will know specifically what to do under a given verbal instruction. (TO)

A nursery school teacher shares some of her collection of spontaneous language phrases of preschoolers, and shows how they reflect the characteristics of what Piaget calls the natural reasoning processes of young children. (CS)

Discusses the use of linguistic resources the child has already acquired when he comes to school in helping him learn to read and communicate effectively. (Author/RB)

Research supported by a University of Nebraska Research Council Summer Fellowship. (DD)

Author brings together from some major sources what we know about metaphor and suggests some questions for systematic study concerning children and metaphor. (Editor)

Research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation; reports results of experiments in general cognitive development of children tested for their comprehension of the words more'' and less'' (RS)

Children 5 to 7 years old were studied; results compared role of private speech in relation to task difficulty, age, and instructions given. (SP)