Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

Teaching techniques in vocabulary learning have not kept pace with development in other areas of language pedagogy, and yet the large number of words that students must learn demands on approach that will bring order and system into the process of vocabulary acquisition. The solution to this problem is a topical vocabulary checklist in two…

Transcriptions of recorded conversations of nine-year-old French children are analyzed and presented in this comparative word count. The actual count of the 55,588 word corpus is arranged alphabetically and contrasted with selected, identical words found in the Francais Fondamental word list. Proper nouns are listed separately at the end of the…

Twenty-seven kindergarten children were trained on two different double classification matrix tasks in an attempt to determine whether the tasks were hierarchically related. Prior behavior analyses of the tasks suggested that the two tasks shared many components, but that the more complex task had in addition components not included in the simpler…

To produce and evaluate a language development program for culturally deprived preschool children based on characteristics of Piaget's theory of intelligence, a 6-week experimental study was carried out in Project Headstart, Starkville, Mississippi. Randomly-selected, 45 Negro Headstart enrollees made up three groups--two were taught the…

This preschool program offered a highly structured curriculum in which language development was fostered through encouraging verbal responses in a game format context. The curriculum, based on skills and concepts required for success in elementary school, included language arts, reading readiness, mathematical concepts, science, and social…

Eighty sixth-grade subjects, split into five independent groups, learned two PA lists of 12 noun pairs each. Two groups performed under traditional transfer conditions with lists conforming to a negative transfer paradigm, A-B, A-C, or to a reference paradigm A-B, C-D. Two other groups learned the same lists under a syntactic PA method where the…

The Proceedings begin with Dean Joshua Fishman's welcoming remarks. Dr. Norman Gordon introduces environmental deprivation and enrichment. Individual differences in the effects of early experience on later behavior are Dr. Donald Forgays' subject, whose paper is discussed by Dr. Lawrence Plotkin. Dr. Kenneth Clark analyzes the "cult of…

Elementary school students should be given opportunities to participate in a variety of experiences and to develop their language skills through talking about these experiences. Children develop self-confidence by expressing their ideas and, upon seeing their words written down, also become interested in the processes of writing and reading. To…

Because learning to read is based on the ability to sift and organize sensory input, it is important for teachers and curriculum planners to know of the sorts of language experiences which develop reception and, subsequently, reading skills. Research on the effects of visual and auditory presentation of information and on early sensory experience…

Assuming that an infant's first stage of verbal communication is melodic and the result of controlling the motion of the vocal cords, a question arises concerning the second stage in development. Is it the shaping of the oral cavity of the direction of the articulators? The author's observation of an infant through his first year of development…

This is the fifth report describing notable reading projects funded under Title Two of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The project descriptions were supplied by ESEA Title Two coordinators and media supervisors in the State departments of education for Arkansas, California, Georgia, Guam, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York,…

Factor analysis accounts for most of the variance in adult ratings of concepts with adjectives. Affective reactions are present in young infants, but still to be explored is how the stable adult factor structure develops from these reactions. Three questions are investigated in this study: (1) is this factor structure present in 3- and…

This paper is concerned with the Aristotelian notion of "universal" as applied to phonological phenomena. It is claimed that speech production in children and adults, in normal and deviant speakers, and in a variety of languages, can all be described according to the same universal phonological rules which constitute the universal process of…

The development of the concept of word is discussed in terms of specific advantages that might be available to bilingual children when compared with their monolingual peers. Three studies are reviewed in which bilingual children show more advanced understanding of some aspects of the concept of word than do monolingual children (Author/LMO)