The papers in this collection focus on the integration of child language development research into curriculum and instruction, which was the general topic of four conferences held in conjunction with the 1979 and 1980 annual conventions of the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. Section one, on child…

Linguistic and cognitive competencies of preschoolers were revealed by interviewing them about routine activities. It was found that freeing preschoolers' speech from constraints inherent in talking about the immediate context results in their demonstrating control over a variety of language-related skills that are generally assumed to be beyond…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

In a consideration of the development of referential communication performance, this paper describes three broad capacities that appear to underlie successful performance: the speaker's ability to analyze the persepective of the listener and formulate a message with this perspective in mind, the child's ability to meet the information processing…

The research reported here focuses on one aspect of the communicative environment, namely vocabulary. The central question motivating this research was whether there are social class and ethnic group differences in the vocabulary used in the home and in the school situation. A corpus of talk was searched for the use of words from four standardized…

The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases.…

Production data from a longitudinal study of seven children in their first attempts to produce words containing fricatives are presented to illustrate how children use four distinct strategies to approach this relatively difficult class of sounds. The strategies are: (1) favorite sounds--an approach used by a subject who seemed to enjoy playing…

The function of speech and its implications for studying, understanding, and promoting language development are explored in this paper. Function is considered to be the purpose of the speaker when speaking, variously termed context of situation, situation, context, circumstance, or mode. It is noted that very few studies of speech and speech…

In an effort to comply with bilingual instruction requirements, school districts throughout California will soon be involved in testing vast numbers of children to determine language proficiency and language dominance. Many language tests will require a child to repeat a sentence or a phrase in exactly the same manner that is stated by an examiner…

Mainstreaming students means moving them out of segregated learning environments in special education classes and integrating them into regular classes with "normal" children. Mainstreaming also has relevance to gifted children. Both gifted and handicapped students are searching for meaning, for which the primary source is language. The main…

This study supports the claim that environmental factors in early intervention programs can positively affect the development of early communicative behaviors in infants. A sample of 20-month-old infants from low socioeconomic backgrounds and at risk for mental retardation was randomly divided into a day care intervention group and a control…

A study was undertaken to explore the relationship of mothers' language to infant development in terms of the infants' development of sensorimotor intelligence. Specifically, the study chronicled the infants' advances in sensorimotor development from J. Piaget's Stage II to Stage III as a possible explanation for changes in maternal language. It…

The use of formulaic speech is seen as a learning strategy in children's first language (L1) acquisition to a limited extent, and to an even greater extent in their second language (L2) acquisition. While the first utterances of the child learning L1 are mostly one-word constructions, many of them are routine words or phrases that the child learns…

A study was conducted of the language development of a hearing child whose mother was deaf and communicated only in sign and whose father was hearing and communicated in both sign and oral language. Results showed similarities in development between the two modalities as well as similarity between development in two separate modalities and two…

This study investigates oral language characteristics of 100 first-grade children to determine the relationship between selected measures of oral language and reading achievement at the end of first grade. Using the Stanford Achievement Test, Reading, the study shows statistically significant, but low, correlations existing between the…