Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

Mothers' utterances were measured during interactions with their 13-month-old infants and correlated with measures of infants' productive lexical development at 13 and 24 months. Correlations between maternal measures and infants' lexical development were lower for employed mothers than for mothers who were full-time caregivers. (BC)

This study investigated whether mothers' responses to their infants' gestures play a role in their infants' vocabulary development. Eight infants were observed interacting at home with their mothers on 2 occasions, when the infants were 10 to 12 months old, and 16 to 18 months old. Videotapes of the observations were transcribed and coded for…

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

In testing kindergartners and first graders in their comprehension of the words "before" and "after," it was found that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. (Author/NCR)

Preschool children's comprehension of the adverbial modifiers "very" and "sort of" was experimentally investigated in 64 children. (Author/NCR)

This experiment used two groups of preschoolers and one group of young grade-schoolers to test for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. (NCR)

Used a pretest-posttest control group design to study the effects of interactive storybook software on the verbal development of 60 kindergarteners from low income families. Found that, for the 25 children who interacted with the software a minimum of 300 minutes over 7 weeks, there was a significant increase in verbal ability. (Author/KB)

By age 3, children from privileged families have heard 30 million more words than children from underprivileged families. Longitudinal data on 42 families examined what accounted for enormous differences in rates of vocabulary growth. Children turned out to be like their parents in stature, activity level, vocabulary resources, and language and…

Command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb morphology, were examined in 30 children aged 2, 3, and 8. Findings have implications for the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular…

A program for secondary remedial reading instruction was developed to use operant conditioning techniques with the following major objectives: (1) to train the student to decode words systematically, (2) to develop the student's verbal repertoire, (3) to improve reading comprehension, and (4) to shape scholarly attitudes and behavior. Pupils were…

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…

This paper explores the questions of how and why children learn names for things. The acquisition of reference is set within a broader discussion of linguistic representation, which defines language as a system functioning in a three-way relationship among the individual language user, the world of experience, and the social community. It is…

Investigates the role of intraverbal learning (a process through which semantic knowledge is acquired from purely linguistic information) in preschool children's acquisition of semantic concepts. Shows that the relative effectiveness of pictorial and intraverbal information depends on the child's age, the type of information supplied, and the…

Reports a study of native Spanish speakers' acquisition of the ability to discriminate lexically in English between similar items with different characteristics. The study also examined the role of first-language interference in the process. (MSE)