Noting the importance of pragmatic behavior, or the socially-appropriate use of language, to parents of preschool children, this study examined developmental changes in the pragmatic teaching of preschoolers and differences in parents' goals for pragmatic teaching in private versus public interactions. Participating in the study were 29…

A total of 42 language-deficient second- through fourth-grade children participated in an experiment investigating the effects on children's skills and self-efficacy of strategy self-verbalization during listening comprehension instruction. An equal number of boys and girls who had been placed in remedial classes received didactic instruction in…

This document reviews a number of recent studies written in French that investigate the nature of communication between 2-year-old infants and others. The review includes three parts. The first part focuses on studies aiming to constitute a behavioral catalog of the child. Characteristically, these studies offer a posteriori interpretations of…

The study of literature in the secondary schools should not be based merely on affective and aesthetic grounds, but on cognitive and linguistic grounds as well. The facilitation of linguistic and cognitive growth can occur only in an environment that allows adolescents to experience literature on their own terms. The carefully structured,…

Designed as a diagnostic tool for assisting early childhood and kindergarten teachers, the Sentence Repetition Task seeks to distinguish children who speak a different dialect and are normal in language development from children who speak a different dialect and are developmentally delayed. This technique is based on the work of Menyuk (1964),…

Vocabulary diversity is a measure either of the language spoken within a fixed time period or of the total utterances, sentences, or words. To measure children's language development as revealed by the diversity of their spoken expression, a comparison was made of the vocabulary of 15 first-grade children of average ability, of first-grade primers…

Paralinguistic and kinesic expression begin at birth and are essential to the development of language. Rhythm, for example, a suprasegmental event, appears to be present at birth or prior to birth. The relationship of physiology to communication is evident in the observations of extra-linguistic aspects of communication, such as movement, the use…

To study the emergence of literacy during the preschool years, a handwritten diary, maintained on a day to day basis, focused on one child, David, from ages two and a half to four and a half. One facet of the study concentrated on his literary language--his incorporation of written texts (children's literature) into his language and background of…

A model for developing instructional analogies was used to produce experimental treatments that included text from a high school biology textbook to which was added extended verbal analogies written by the researcher linking each of two biology concepts to analogous familiar concepts. The control treatment was text from the biology textbook…

This paper reports two studies which examined sequential dependence in the dyadic interaction between mother and infant. In the first study, brief videotaped behavioral samples were collected for 24 primiparous mother-infant (M - I) dyads to examine the degree of reciprocal contingency in M - I interactions. Two coders, using a computer interfaced…

The effect of children on adult language has only recently received serious consideration in the fields of linguistics, psychology, education, pediatrics and anthropology, although the importance of parental behavior for the language development of the child is universally recognized. This paper presents a review of the literature on children's…

This paper offers some ideas on the types of behavior that can be considered precursors to language and that also lay the foundations for logic, mathematics, physics, etc. The paper posits the problem of whether a theory of language must be formulated before one can formulate a theory of language acquisition, or whether the reverse is true. The…

Described in this report is a home-based, cognitive-affective intervention program involving 93 mothers and their children. This demonstration program sought to show that the principal cognitive element missing from the experience of low-income children in preparation for schooling is a sufficient amount of concept-building verbal interaction in…

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. This paper represents the beginning of a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrates on comparing the syntax used by ten…

This keynote address argues that policy makers should consider a project approach to implementation of research results regarding foreign language learning; they should pay attention to what is being revealed by a growing number of evaluation and impact studies concerning effective innovation and project effects. Second, language teaching research…