Metalinguistic skill is the ability to assume an objective attitude toward language. Metalinguistic awareness is less easily acquired and appears later developmentally than speaking and listening skills. What one needs to know to perceive and use language is not necessarily the same thing that one needs to know to reflect on and comment on…

Concluded that factual questions appear to inhibit the higher cognitive processes of grade 2 and grade 4 subjects, while the interpretive questions stimulate the higher cognitive processes. (DD)

Type of discourse and syntax are related; speech researchers will have to specify type of discourse for their results to be comparable with other studies. (JH)

Children use simile and metaphor at an early age in both spontaneous oral language and written language. This study sought (1) to design an instrument to elicit children's spontaneous oral production of simile and metaphor, (2) to elicit such responses and examine the nature of the responses to different tasks and stimuli, (3) and to develop…

Investigated the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands in children (ages five, six, seven, and nine years), using finger-tapping and message production tasks, separately and simultaneously. Findings suggest that the relative effort requirements of communication decrease with…

The relationship between oral reading ability and the use of structure (function) words was examined in a dissertation study which hypothesized that the use of structure words in verbal discourse would be greater in children who have no difficulty in oral reading than in children who experience difficulty. Structure words were identified as those…