Ideas judged to be significant for the future development of special education are considered: learning disabilities and the problem of definition, preschool and infant education, language development, behavior modification approach, and attention as a critical process. The interrelationships between general and special education and basic and…

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in three, four, five, and six year olds to examine bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The judgments of the six year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children.…

In studies involving 12 and 16 mentally retarded preschoolers, retarded children's lexical usage was examined as a function of informativeness. (Author/CL)

Evaluated efficacy of 3 preschool language curricula during 24-week intervention with 76 preschool children. Found no significant pretest-posttest gains in basic concept acquisition among Boehm Resource Guide, Bracken Concept Development Program, and Peabody Language Development Kit-Revised (PLDK-R). Only PLDK-R demonstrated significant…

The study evaluated whether signed and/or spoken symbols could be successfully trained in a child-oriented treatment approach with five preschoolers with various severe disabilities. The program's major treatment components included child-led orientation and simultaneous input. Results indicated both positive linguistic and sociocommunicative…

Twenty severely/profoundly hearing-impaired children, aged three-six, interacted with the investigator while playing with toys. A significant relationship was found between imaginative play and language development. No relationship was found between imaginative play and chronological age. Correspondences were found between language development and…

Twenty-five preschool children with specific language impairment and 25 controls were evaluated on generalization of trained bound morphemes to untrained vocabulary stems, in 2 training conditions: explicit, trainer verbalization of the affixation "rule" and an "implicit rule" condition. Findings indicated that explicit presentation of…

Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (N3C) principle by 22 toddlers with Down syndrome was studied. Results indicated that the ability to fast map a new word to a category is not available at the start of lexical acquisition. Children who used the N3C principle had larger productive vocabularies than others and had begun to acquire new…

This study tested the production of 18 Spanish consonants by 120 Mexican-American preschool children (ages 3-5), to determine the age of acquisition of Spanish consonants. Data are provided on percent of correct production of each sound at six different age levels and are graphically illustrated to compare age of acquisition with another study's…

Examined the effect of linguistic contrast in children's learning of color names. A novel color term for a stimulus color that was contrasted with a child's label helped five-year olds learn the new term. When the contrast was presented more than once, three- and four-year olds performed much like the five-year olds. (BC)

Preschoolers learned a novel adjective or count noun for an object and chose between two objects that shared an object kind or a material kind property with the target object. Found that, in interpreting adjectives, four-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was…

Notes that names are the first words most children write and that learning to write their name can be highly motivating for preschoolers. Addresses: why preschool children should be encouraged to write their names; organizing and facilitating the sign-in process at school; how children develop their ability to write their names; and the benefits…

Examines NP-type nouns, nominals that alternate between count noun and noun phrase constructions with resulting changes in their semantic interpretation. (Author/VWL)

This report is the latest in a series of reports investigating the link between high quality early childhood education and economic development. Longitudinal research from national experts indicates that high quality early childhood programs are likely to impart significant social, academic, and economic benefits to the children who participate,…