Used a one-year longitudinal study to examine the extent to which grammatical awareness in preschool predicted reading independently of preschool general verbal skills, phonological awareness, and word recognition. Found that, independently of other skills, grammatical awareness predicted word recognition and pseudoword recoding, but not reading…

Examines short-term memory for spoken words ignored at the time of their presentation. Age differences in the persistence of memory was found. Suggests that relatively attention-free properties of short-term memory may change with development in childhood, and priority should be given to distinguish maturational and experiential influences on…

Discusses how young children learn the art of communication and negotiation through conversations with their peers. Notes how such verbal explorations help children comfort one another, become assimilated into other children's games, and resolve conflicts. (HTH)

This longitudinal study examined the hypothesis that two different types of joint-attention skills were related to verbal and nonverbal IQ measures through middle childhood. Subjects were infants born preterm and tested at 13 months and at 8 years. Findings provide support for the hypothesis that the initiation of joint attention makes a unique…

Mothers and caregivers of 28 preschoolers were trained to facilitate children's play. Play training of adults was shown to be an effective mechanism for enhancing preschoolers' verbal cognition. Training of mothers and caregivers was more effective than training of caregivers only. (CB)

Attention is given to the characteristics, identification, and remediation of language disorders frequently associated with learning-disabled students. Characteristics include off-target responding, inaccurate word selection, neologisms, referent errors, topic closure, and sequencing difficulties. Remediation involves self-concept building,…

Describes interactive games that can be used to encourage students to complete reading assignments, and gives suggestions for improving the usefulness of readings. The games emphasize instructional objectives including verbal fluency, recall of facts, perceiving important points, summarizing, heuristics, debating, and tutorial support. (LRW)

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

A cross-cultural quantitative review of contemporary findings of gender differences in variability in verbal, mathematics, and spatial abilities finds that the well-established U.S. finding of considerably greater male variability in mathematical and spatial abilities is not invariant across countries and cultures. (SLD)

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…

Measures of IQ, verbal short-term memory, speech perception, and phonological awareness were administered to 136 3rd and 4th graders. Structural equation modeling revealed that IQ, speech perception, and verbal short-term memory each contributed unique variance to the phonological awareness construct. Results underscore the importance of speech…

Examines the role of students in the formative evaluation of instructional materials and reviews research on criteria for selecting students for the evaluation process. Studies that investigated the following criteria are described: (1) level of verbalization; (2) aptitude; and (3) cognitive styles field-dependent and field-independent. (18…

Two experiments compared the working memory performance of 77 highly gifted seventh and eighth graders (13 and 14 Years ole) with verbal or mathematical precocity, or both. Different types of intellectual talent correlate with different working memory characteristics and differences in how digit and word stimuli are represented in memory. (SLD)

Beginning secondary students find it easier to express their understanding of scientific evidence verbally rather than in writing. Concludes that much work can be done to improve the critical nature of the dialog pupils enter into in their written work, thus making their level of procedural understanding more clear. Contains 27 references.…

Contents of 800 elementary, middle, and high school textbooks published from 1919 to 1991 were analyzed with regard to their levels of difficulty. Following World War II, there was a major decline in schoolbook difficulty which may have led to the subsequent decline in SAT-verbal scores. (MAK)