Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

Examines factors that contributed to unexpectedly large gains in verbal competence among a diverse and representative sample of urban first graders. Concludes that exceptionally high growth in the first grade is associated prominently with the characteristics of teachers and the maturity/personality and academic self-image of the students.…

The Word Meaning section of the Metropolitan Readiness Test, Form A, was questioned as a true measure of the capabilities of culturally disadvantaged children. Therefore, an attempt was made to compare the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test with a test in which as many objects as possible were renamed to coincide with the language of the students…

A study examined primary-grade children's ability to construct felicitous, or audience-accommodating, character introductions in their stories. The study was intended to (1) describe the linguistic variation children employed in character introductions; (2) identify cognitive factors other than egocentrism contributing to infelicitous…

In this study of students in a combined kindergarten-first grade class, the impact of students' ways of speaking on their classroom social identities was considered. The study focused on discourse in "first circle," a daily event in which teacher and students meet to start school by taking attendance, filling in a calendar, and planning…

The development of the concept of word is discussed in terms of specific advantages that might be available to bilingual children when compared with their monolingual peers. Three studies are reviewed in which bilingual children show more advanced understanding of some aspects of the concept of word than do monolingual children (Author/LMO)

Explains the relationship between understanding a temporal or causal event and the ability to articulate and comprehend sentences about the event. The subjects of the research were 60 children from an Italian elementary school, 20 each from the first, third, and fifth grades. (CFM)

Over a school year, researchers had first graders talk and write about paintings, picture books, and films while participating in a program that introduced them to visual literacy. Researchers found that, over the school year, children's choices of pictures and volume of language changed and that urban and suburban children differed. (SM)