Examined the differences between linguistic-cognitive ability and language performance in a sample of 172 preschool and kindergarten children from 3 sociocultural locations (urban, working class, and rural) in Greece. Linguistic-cognitive abilities were found to have no influence on verbal interaction and production. Sociocultural influences did…

This longitudinal study of 1,075 school children from pre-kindergarten through grades 7 or 8 identified children with persistent disabilities in either reading (6.6 percent), arithmetic (2.3 percent), or both reading and arithmetic disabilities (3.4 percent). Comparison of groups found the specific arithmetic group was superior on preschool verbal…

THIS STUDY OF THE ARTICULATORY AND INTELLIGIBILITY LEVEL OF A SOCIALLY DISADVANTAGED GROUP OF CHILDREN IN THE HEAD START PROGRAM INVOLVED 150 CHILDREN, 4 1/2 - 6 YEARS OF AGE, WITH EQUAL NUMBERS OF BOYS AND GIRLS. THIS GROUP WAS COMPOSED OF CHILDREN OF FAMILIES WITH SPANISH LANGUAGE BACKGROUND, OF CHILDREN OF NATIVE NEGRO FAMILIES, AND OF CHILDREN…

For each of 4 years varying numbers (from 45 to 750) of 3- to 5-year-old children, mostly Mexican-American, Spanish speaking, participated in a program aimed at language development. Classes met 3 hours daily, five times a week, in small discussion-and-activity groups that included five children and one adult. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test…

Irregularities in oral fluency, or "disfluencies," are common in the speech habits of both children and adults. Disfluencies can take the form of hesitations, revisions, repetitions, or interjections. Most disfluenceies do not occur at random, but are directly linked to other factors such as verbal planning--the combination of decisions…

Parents engaged in a book reading task with their preschool child. The extent to which parents' teaching of children becomes less directive as a function of children's age and communicative status and the relationship between parents' interaction styles and children's verbal intelligence quotient was studied. (DWH)

Noting that low-income children are at risk for early school difficulties and that social and emotional competencies are hypothesized to be crucial for early school success, this study used naturalistic observations to provide descriptive information about low-income children's emotional and social competence in school settings. The specific goals…

The mental development of 332 preschool-age children with orthopedic disabilities was assessed at a children's hospital over a 10-year period, and comparisons were made for right-handed and left-handed. The left-handed children were slower than right-handed children in learning speech and language skills (Author/SEW)

Verbal precocity at 20 months of age did not predict children's later precocious reading. Frequency of story reading in the home at 24 months predicted children's language ability at 2.5 and 4.5 years and, along with literacy instruction, predicted knowledge of print conventions at 4.5. (BC)

Two levels of stimulus condition were used to determine whether or not the amount of salient information contained in the perceptual stimuli accompanying orally presented "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how and why) facilitates children's comprehension. Conditions varied in terms of the number of…

Two way analyses of variance and cross-group descriptive comparisons assessed the effectiveness of the Siop Poison Prevention Program, which included an educational program and the use of warning labels, on improving verbal and visual discrimination of poisonous and nonpoisonous products for preschool children. The study sample consisted of 156…

The Preschool Academic Skills Test was developed from an analysis of first-grade reading and mathematics materials to identify those behaviors that were assumed to be in students' repertoires prior to first grade. The 105 items are grouped in 10 subtests: Vocabulary, Color Naming, Classification, Functional Relationships, Visual Matching, Auditory…

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…

The purpose of this research was to begin to refute the deficit approach to the verbal abilities of poor children. The contention was that data collected on poor children's verbal abilities had been done in incorrect social situations. Prior research had indicated that language development is innate and that disadvantaged children will be…

Language-impaired children (N=87) were assessed at the ages of 4, 4 1/2, and 5 1/2. In 37%, the language disorder resolved by 5 1/2 years (44% resolution in those with normal nonverbal ability). Outcome for individuals could be predicted with 90% accuracy at four years. (Author/KM)