Reports two studies in which preschool and elementary school children's preference for certain strategies in copying a compound figure were interpreted in terms of a simple phrase structure. The phrase structure involved movements controlled with minimal degrees of freedom. (Author/JMB)

Verbal interactions of three 2-year-old boys attending a play group were analyzed from videotapes made approximately 8 months apart. During this period, rates of interaction increased significantly, speakers learned to select message content more appropriate to the listener, and participants learned to watch each other more often. (Author/JMB)

Examines the understanding of the pragmatic function of mental terms ("think,""know,""guess") to express the relative certainty of 69 children aged 3-11. Results showed an improvement with age for the "know-think" and "know-guess" contrasts, but no improvement with age for the…

This study attempted to test the notion that the reinforcing stimuli which maintain high rates of speech may not consist solely of events extrinsic to the person but may involve (sensory) stimulation generated by the behavior itself. (Author)

Investigates the predictability of cognitive differences at 12 months from infant and maternal behaviors at 4 months. Overall, the results show that some individual differences in cognition may be predictable across the first year of life. (Author/RH)

Verbal and behavioral measures of children's knowledge are frequently dissociated. These situations represent a largely untapped but important resource for furthering an understanding of human cognition. In this paper, verbal-behavioral dissociations in children are discussed and analyzed, drawing from a wide range of domains. The article explores…

Male infant vocalizations were studied as a function of age. (JMB)

The verbal interactions of 20 mothers with their children, who were between 1.9 and 5.0 years old, were recorded and analyzed. (SB)

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Examined relationships between early vocabulary composition, early language use, and properties of mothers' child-directed speech at 10 words. Found that, when the effects of the child on the mother at 10 words was controlled, there was a negative correlation between mothers' production of speech illustrating word boundaries and the percentage of…

Questions whether children's use of language indicates they (1) understand temporal sequence, (2) distinguish goal-oriented from nongoal-oriented activities, and (3) prefer discussing the aspect of events prior to the time of events. Also investigates whether findings for past and future conditions are parallel. (Author/DB)

Studied the development of speech act comprehension in 36 retarded and 36 nonretarded children at the developmental ages of five, seven, and nine years. Retarded and nonretarded individuals followed the answer obviousness rule and used the contextual and linguistic clues available to respond to yes-no interrogative sentences. (RJC)