Analysis of 165 studies (representing the testing of 1,418,899 subjects) that reported data on gender differences in verbal ability indicated a slight female superiority in performance. The difference is so small that it appears that gender differences in verbal ability no longer exist. A major goal was also to define age trends in the pattern of…

Early child phonology was studied using phonetically transcribed samples that six parents provided of their children's vocalizations, beginning when the children were about 11 months old and continuing to four years of age. The primary study objective was to obtain a sufficient amount of longitudinal data from several children to support a…

This study was designed to investigate the role of culture and education in the development of formal operational thought, by comparing the results achieved by suburban American youths, American educated youths who were recent migrants, and youths who had been educated in Puerto Rico. It was hypothesized that the suburban youths and Puerto Rican…

Examined the extent to which maternal linguistic input enabled children to use syntactic bootstrapping. Studied uses of 25 common verbs in speech of 57 mothers to their 1-year olds and 2-year olds. Found that verbs can be used to create informative syntactic frames, syntactic frames can cue appropriate verb class, and multiple syntactic framing…

Observations of a 12-year-old boy provide an in-depth look at the writing of a successful adolescent writer, as it developed over a 2-year period. The subject was interviewed once a week in his home. In addition to the information obtained in interviews, his texts were analyzed for formal features. Three factors emerged as particularly…

This article hypothesizes that language repetition of young children (in the sense used by Kobashigawa and Snow) does not help language acquisition. The evidence comes from the results of a prior study in which no indication was found that mothers who repeat themselves a great deal have children who acquire language more quickly. However,…

Eight experiments studied the following aspects of associative strategies in learning: classification; verbalization at three developmental levels; verbalization by normal and educable children; facilitation of associative learning among educable retardates; effectiveness of familiarization and differentiation training on the successful employment…

A discussion of word acquisition rates and strategies is based upon a 6-month case study of an Estonian-speaking child who gradually and systematically relaxed phonotactic constraints to allow greater complexity in word production. In addition to the cognitive tools of assimilation and accomodation as described by Piaget, the child used a further…

A. R. Luria, in his conception of the verbal control of behavior, regards four fundamental and distinctive functional attributes of the human speech system as making up a signaling system that humans alone possess: (1) the nominative role of language, (2) the generalizing or semantic role, (3) the communicative role, and (4) the role of…

The acquisition of the consonant system by a child acquiring Mexican-Spanish as her native language is described. During the earliest stages (from 1;7 to 2;1 years of age), the data showed several phenomena that could best be accounted for by assuming a central role for the word as the basic unit being acquired. The evidence for the centrality of…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…

The effects of age and intelligence levels upon word associations were studied in 96 intellectually retarded, normal, and superior children with IQ's of 65 to 80, 91 to 110, and 117 to 158 respectively. A word association and a word usage task (reliability coefficients of .91 and .98) called for homogeneous responses to six form classes--count…

Used observations and home visits to examine sex differences in language ability of 54 disadvantaged children at risk for poor language outcomes. Found that language difficulties increased over time, boys were at a constant disadvantage to girls in language development, and sex difference in language ability appeared even when families had similar…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…

A previous study found that middle-class Hebrew-English bilingual children were characterized by distinctive perceptual strategies and more advanced processing in certain verbal tasks, as compared to similar monolinguals. The present study tested whether similar strategies and response patterns will appear when the children involved are from…