Sixty children, 20 from each of grades 1, 3, and 5 served as subjects in a study that examined how elementary school age children realize the intent of directives embedded within written and picture book narratives. Directives were defined as the range of language forms used to direct actions (imperative statement, need/want statement, permission…

Written by teachers, linguists, psychologists, and reading specialists, this book elucidates the relationship between reading and language, and explains why reading should be regarded as a language-based process. The book is divided into eight sections, each of which includes an introduction and sources for further reading. The essays for each…

Both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language, and some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. Two studies explored the relationship between written language prosody and punctuation. The first study asked people to read…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

A theory of the components of verbal intelligence is developed and tested in this series of experiments. After reviewing alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding verbal intelligence, a componential theory of verbal comprehension is proposed. This theory specifies the information-processing components, context cues, and mediating…

The first of a two-volume final report, this document focuses on a study of written language growth and development among 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year old children. The first section of the document contains five essays dealing with race, sex, age, socioeconomic status, and language; orchestrating the literacy event; reading and writing as…

The use of locative prepositions in the spontaneous speech of 30 Hebrew speaking children two to three years old was studied. The rank order of locative prepositions is determined according to the correct use in obligatory contexts, and tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the order of acquisition of these terms in Hebrew. An attempt is made…

This study attempts to assess the developmental psycholinguistics hypothesis that language acquisition strategies are universal. Four types of statements were focused upon: (1) true affirmative statements (e.g., "You are a child"), (2) false affirmative statements ("You are a baby"), (3) false negative statements ("You aren't a child"), and (4)…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…

This paper considers the problem of differentiating thought and language in a way that makes it possible to relate them to each other. The analysis covers approaches of sociolinguistic research, different models of language and cognitive functioning within psychology and linguistics, the cybernetic approach, and psycholinguistic analyses. A common…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

A study investigated one aspect of the speech/reading comprehension relationship--that between the ability to select the correct standard English verbal endings (-s and -ed) and the ability to recognize the tense of a passage when time information was encoded primarily in the verbs and adverbs. Subjects were 135 third, sixth, and ninth grade…

In order to attempt to identify the linguistic difficulties of slow learners, errors made by two groups of English-speaking adults learning French as a second language were compared. The subjects of the two groups shared similar characteristics, with the exception of the amount of time required to cover the same linguistic material (Group 1: 17…

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…

This study examined bilingual children's performance in reading Persian and English at grades one, three and six. Two types of programs, one an immersion curriculum and the other a split curriculum where half the daily instruction is in one language and the remaining half is in the other, were compared with monolingual control groups. The results…