Most vocabulary growth during the school-age years occurs incidentally. However, little is understood about the influence of language skills on word knowledge growth during reading. Using a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, we examined incidental word learning through reading, considering the presence/absence of supportive context and…

Indications are that verbal-sensory-perceptual ability can be raised during critical preschool years to improve chances for later learning. Measurement instruments were: Stanford-Benet, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception, Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, and Metropolitan Readiness Tests.…

Reports that after exposure to child's speech, Northern and Southern black and white teachers tend to classify him as culturally disadvantaged'' if verbal and grammatical patterns are not standard

After taking base rate measures of verbal behavior, using a specially devised Story Telling Test and selected sub-tests from the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, 34 children with a mean age of 4-4, attending a year-round Head Start program, were assigned to matched experimental and control groups. The children in the experimental group…

A study was made of the interrelationships among the language skill complex (auditory discrimination, articulation of speech sounds, recognition vocabulary, and vocabulary of use), grade level, intelligence level, race, sex, father's occupation, school, chronological age, and general reading ability of children placed in the primary grades with…

In an attempt to explore a systematic approach to language expansion and improved sentence structure, echoic and modeling procedures for language instruction were compared. Four hypotheses were formulated: (1) children who use modeling procedures will produce better structured sentences than children who use echoic prompting, (2) both echoic and…

A study was conducted using a longitudinal, multivariate, multimethod approach to determine the effects of parent education programs on black mothers and children from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. Black infants from lower status communities, ages 22-41 months, were evaluated during the early intervention study. Instruments used included…

This project deals with characteristic functioning of lower class educationally disadvantaged preschool children, the impact of the preschool experience, and the personality of the child and his readiness to gain from the educational process. The disadvantaged preschool children functioned intellectually and verbally below their middle class peers…