An extension of a project that examined the associations between parental responses to children's emotional upset and children's competence in preschool, this study focuses on gender differences in the socialization of competence. Parents' warmth and responsiveness, firmness and control, and responses to their children's emotional upset were…

This in-process report discusses the writing development of a student from first grade through mid-eighth grade. An analysis of the student's T-unit length averages from third grade to mid-eighth grade reveals a leap of syntactic complexity from the fifth to the sixth grade. Among the other findings are the following: two modes of…

Language training for the non-verbal or language delayed child should utilize feedback to reinforce correct responses and should closely follow the syntactical development of normal children. The two basic areas of language training are receptive and expressive. Receptive language training includes attending and responding, following single phase…

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of…

A study was conducted to determine criteria to measure successful language development and to determine what factors might be considered to be the determiners of this development. Subjects were 16 children, aged 3 years 3 months, selected on an intuitive basis from the 64 children in the older age group to represent the full range of development,…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how children's responses to literature can help develop literacy. The subjects were 15 first-grade students at Overstreet Elementary School in Starkville (Mississippi). Two school observations were carried out prior to the collection of data on individual students. Case studies were conducted…

A study was conducted to determine whether children think about the verbal messages embedded in songs, or merely sing the words without thinking about them. A total of 48 preschool girls and boys viewed a televised vignette of the song "Frere Jacques" under varying conditions of language comprehensibility, rehearsal, and repetition. The visual…

This research review sought to discover the forms of family verbal interaction that nurture language development in infants and toddlers, the function of different family members in this process, and the role of environmental factors in language development. Results indicate that speech to a child is significantly different from speech to an…

A study investigated several questions concerning the amount of viewing and types of programs children and parents watched alone and together and the relation of viewing patterns to children's development. Investigated over a 2-year period were coviewing patterns, differences between younger and older children in their viewing with parents,…

A study of the babbling and phonological development of 54 infants used half-hour videotape recordings of the children at play in their own homes. The vocal output was phonetically transcribed twice for interrater agreement, and analyzed for the consonants used five times or more in the child's vocal repertoire. These consonants were considered to…

A single-subject study was conducted with a language-delayed male Native American child (age 3 years, 5 months), who exhibited minimal ability to communicate verbally and relied on gesture as a primary means of communicating. In order to identify and code the child's specific communicative intentions, the Coggins and Carpenter (1981) Communication…

This paper examines children's early attempts at describing events absent in space and time, referred to as the "reportative function." The first part of the paper offers some explanations for the late emergence of the reportative function in young children's speech. Part two presents examples of children's attempts to report past events…

Differences in 3-month-old infants' vocal responsiveness to vocal-visual stimulation by mothers and strangers has been shown to be related to performance on both the Stanford-Binet at 3 years of age and the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistics at 5 years of age. The present retesting of 12 of the original 14 normal, first-born male subjects, now 12…

This study investigated the relationships obtained among verbal imitation, comprehension, and production when a stimulus sentence exceeded the child's short term memory. A total of 32 children, aged 3 to 5 years, took tests of comprehension, nonverbal imitation, verbal imitation, and production of structures expressing sequence ("before", "after",…

This paper discusses how the role of instructors changes as young learners advance along a mastery continuum, or a process of transition from an initial novice to an eventual expert status in the learning of a skill. Four stages along this continuum are: (1) acquisition, in which the learner does not know the task; (2) early consolidation, in…