This bibliography on the acquisition and development of speech and language lists, in alphabetical order by author, 423 books and journal articles published between 1937 and 1970. [Not available in hard copy due to marginal legibility of original document.] (DD)

This study focuses on the systematic study of verbal behavior patterns of college elementary education student teaching supervisors in dyadic conferences with student teachers and cooperating teachers. The major research problem of the study concerned the possible differences in the verbal behavior patterns of college supervisors while interacting…

Examined the communicative behavior of 40 maltreated and nonmaltreated 31-month-old toddlers and their mothers. Results revealed that maltreated toddlers followed a pattern of shorter mean length of utterance, less descriptive speech, and proportionally less relevant speech. (RJC)

Reviews three studies that focused on ways in which social interactions within the family support literacy acquisition. Suggests that parents' most important contributions to their children's literacy development may come through language interactions, such as storytelling and interactions that foster vocabulary development, rather than through…

Offers some conversational suggestions (modeled on a typical day in the life of the preschool) intended to motivate children to communicate and to build a better relationship between pupil and teacher. (Author/ED)

This paper provides a brief outline of some of the constituents of speech, language, and universal stages of the development of talking in children up to the age of 2 1/2 years. Mention is made of theories put forward to account for universal aspects of speech and language development; recent research into the way adults talk to very small…

This report describes an investigation of the acquisition by children of a symbolic system, specifically English nomenclature--that set of nouns that serves the function of naming, denoting, or referring to objects. The five studies involve nine experiments dealing with one or another of the aspects of this problem. Two questions guided these…

Three- to ten-year-olds responded to a three-dimensional object by drawing it and/or verbally describing it. Two days later, they reconstructed the object in drawn or verbal form. Descriptive abilities increased with age. The children displayed differences in verbal and graphic description only when recalling the object from memory. (Author/RM)

Six preschool children, mostly from poverty-level backgrounds, were taught to make descriptive statements about objects. The category-descriptor statements were organized and sequenced into four clusters. As sets of new statements were successively taught and evaluated, the number and diversity of probed category and descriptor terms steadily and…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…

Concerned with educational problems associated with low socioeconomic status, this pilot study in linguistic ecology was designed to substitute hard data for speculation about the nature and frequency of verbal behavior in the world of the poor child. To avoid self-consciousness and any restrictions on movement of the subjects, a small…

A cues-pause-point procedure was used to train two severely retarded females to remain quiet before, during, and briefly after the presentation of questions and then to verbalize on the basis of environmental cues whose labels represented the correct responses. Echolalia was rapidly replaced by correct responding on the trained stimuli. (Author/JW)

This booklet for parents provides a brief explanation of how babies and young children learn to communicate with others (through actions and words) and suggests specific ways parents can help their children learn to communicate effectively. (RH)

This is a research report on the acquisition and development of language in children from 4 to 6 years as observed in the pre-elementary grades. The research was done by a number of teams scattered throughout France, and this book is a collection of the papers prepared as a result of their research. The report is divided into five sections. The…

The research reported is part of an investigation into the acquisition of grammar, using nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Three children were seen for approximately 8 hours, every 6 weeks, in their homes, from the age of 19 months--soon after the earliest…