Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

The symbolic representational block constructions of twenty 4-year-olds and twenty 7-year-olds were analyzed from Werner and Kaplan's (1963) theoretical perspective. Each child was read a story and then asked to use the blocks to represent the story. Older children included in their representations a larger number of features that were central to…

A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Three studies, involving 140 black third grade students reading below grade level, sought to determine whether dialect interference negatively affected reading comprehension. The first investigation found that a story could be repatterned to significantly reduce the number of miscues and minimize dialect interference between the student's oral…

The paper describes assessment techniques, the process of aid selection, and therapy procedures with young nonverbal handicapped children. Assessment of such children requires an evaluation of the child's present means of communication, hearing, vision, receptive skills, and ability to use language (verbal, gestural, or graphic). Among factors to…

This paper reports on a study of early childhood musical identities. Participants were children aged 3-8 years and their parent(s) from three geographically disparate areas in the state of New South Wales, Australia and Hawaii, USA. Data were collected in the form of semi-structured interviews, focusing on what, where and with whom the children…

This paper addresses the nature of child-initiated episodes of mathematical patterning prior to formal schooling. In a multi-site case study, children's engagement in mathematical patterning experiences was investigated as was the teachers' involvement and influence in these experiences. A conceptual framework was used to guide the examination of…

Factors involved in assistive technology use by young children with disabilities were explored through case studies of five families who had received intensive training at Camp Gizmo, an assistive technology camp for young children. Families, service providers, and preservice students in special education and speech language pathology engaged in a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of gender in young children's teasing and bullying behavior. Observations and interviews were conducted with children in K-3 public school classrooms in urban and suburban locales with racially, ethnically, and economically diverse student bodies. The observations documented the gender of…

This project explored the learning interchanges which took place between early childhood student teachers and young children, provoked by three-dimensional installations within a children's art exhibition. The exhibition, comprising both two- and three-dimensional artworks, contained over 280 artworks from 15 early childhood programs in the…

To study whether children profit from use of explanatory analogies to acquire information from expository text, 24 five-year-old kindergartners and 34 seven-year-old second graders listened to and had to recall texts with and without such analogies. Analogies provided assistance in information acquisition; the effect was stronger for older…

Six experiments involving 262 children (as young as 16 months and as old as fifth grade) indicate that the basic framework for coding location is present early in life and that later development consists of an increasing ability to impose organization on a broad range of bounded spaces. (SLD)

Studied the long-term benefits of preschool programs for young children living in poverty in the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study, which examined the lives of 123 African Americans randomly divided into a preschool treatment group and a no-preschool comparison group. Cost-benefit analyses of data on these students to age 27 show beneficial effects…

Parents are young children's greatest resource, and quality parenting helps develop children's self-esteem. Every child needs caring parents to be teachers as well as nurturers. Parents can create learning experiences for their children in everyday activities, such as cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. In addition to teaching, parents should…

This study explored teacher and student perspectives of a specific event in an early childhood classroom. The study replicates previous research on the construct of positionings to study social interaction in a prekindergarten integrated classroom. Subjects were one teacher and one 5-year-old student. A 20-minute segment of videotape was observed…