Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…

Describes a study that investigates the order of acquisition of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew among 105 children between two and five years of age. Results indicate that children begin using case-marked pronouns as early as age two and that the stage of morphological development parallels that of English-speaking children. (SED)

Discusses a longitudinal study of young children's acquisition of complex sentences for expressing their beliefs about causally related events, in the transition in language development from simple to complex syntax. While most of the children's statements expressed subjective meaning overall, the acquisition of syntactic connectives was…

Three experiments demonstrate that children four to ten years old, when presented with a series recall task with pictures of common objects having short or long names, showed consistently better recall of pictures with short names. (HOD)

Research indicates that deaf individuals do not develop the usual hemispheric specialization for verbal and nonverbal processing and that early severe hearing impairment influences the lateral organization of the brain for interpreting linguistic information. Possible instructional implications include encouraging an early symbol system for…

Reports results from a detailed syntactic analysis of spoken language samples collected from poor and good readers at eight years of age. Results showed an undeniably strong association between reduced language comprehension and reading impairment at age eight, an association that appeared to strengthen by age nine. (SED)

Five language-eliciting situations were presented to kindergarten and primary-grade children to identify developmental trends and task effects in the complexity of language structures, vocabulary, functions, and story conventions used. Limited developmental differences and significant task effects were found. Implications for classroom instruction…

Teachers should enrich students' language environment, give children opportunities to practice their language, and allow feedback on language to occur. (DD)

This booklet was inspired by the need of educators and therapists of preschool students who are blind and visually impaired to share their observations of children with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia (ONH) and the therapies found to be helpful when working with these children. The work done at the Blind Childrens Center is very rewarding, and these…

Study of the arts enhances young people's intellectual, personal, and social development. The arts provide a rich and engaging curriculum that develops students? abilities to think, reason, and understand the world and its cultures. A comprehensive arts education encompasses such areas as the history of the arts, the honing of critical-analysis…

59 sixth grade boys and girls were randomly assigned to two treatment groups. E's were exposed to three creative thinking strategies for 360 minutes. Significant favourable effects of training were found on verbal fluency, flexibility and originality, but training by sex interaction effects only on verbal originality. (Author)

Speculative explanation for the misapplication of adjectives for adverbs in colloquial speech, e.g., He drives good'' for He drives well.'' (RS)

Results clearly supported the hypothesis that adolescents who are typically nonverbal, and considered poor candidates for verbal-type psychotherapy, can be shaped into emitting a substantially higher rate of verbal initiations. (Author)

Various teaching methods are suggested for the teaching of spontaneous choral reading to fifth and sixth grade students. Examines differences between choral reading and spontaneous choral reading. (RB)

Working with a sample of third-grade students, researchers compared two sentence-modeling curricula: one focusing exclusively on writing and the other, the Integrated Sentence-Modeling Curriculum (ISMC), combining language arts areas. Designed for elementary school students, the ISMC introduces children to complex syntactic structures by involving…