Children's spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and their knowledge about phonological representations of word pronunciations were assessed in a sample of 105 children in kindergarten through second grade. Children were given expressive and receptive tasks with dialect-sensitive stimuli. Students who produced many NMAE…

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in…

Focuses on aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. Examined rhyme awareness, articulation, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 preschool children. (Author/VWL)

Normally hearing children (aged 4--10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6--14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed…

Examined the relationship between oral language and literacy in a two-year, multivariate design. Through empirical cluster analysis of a sample of 88 kindergarten children, four oral language subtypes were identified based on measures of semantics, syntax, metalinguistics, and oral narration. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a study of the development of literacy, bilingualism, and metalinguistic awareness. Subjects were speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl from Central Mexico. Assessments of metalinguistic awareness related to different aspects of the children's consciousness of the languages they spoke or understood were compared to a series of assessments of…

Reports on a longitudinal study of the relationship between productive phonological ability and awareness in children under the age of six. The study followed 45 subjects with variant productive phonology levels from the mean age of 3 years, 6 months to 6 years, 0 months. As a child matures in productive phonology, accompanying exponential growth…