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At least 451 records · Page 25Linked to original sources
PubMed1995

Planning in the real world: preschool children's scripts and plans for familiar events.

3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds reported either scripts or verbal plans for 2 familiar events, going grocery shopping and going to the beach, and also constructed plans to remedy and prevent mishaps that might occur for each event. With increasing age, children reported more information, focused more on onset activities, and mentioned more specific planning activities in their plans than in their scripts. Although children at all ages provided adequate remedy plans, only 5-year-olds provided adequate prevention plans. In general, children were better at planning for the beach than for grocery shopping. Results indicate that developmental differences in event knowledge, in the ability to reflect upon event knowledge, and the event that they are planning for affect preschoolers' planning for real-world events.

Child↗
PubMed1998

The role of semantic context and memory in the acquisition of novel nouns.

Three studies assessed the ability of 2-year-olds to use semantic context to infer the meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings a day later. In the first experiment, 24 2-year-olds heard novel nouns in sentences that contained semantically constraining verbs (e.g., "Mommy feeds the ferret"). They chose from a set of four novel object pictures to indicate the referent. Children learned a majority of the novel words. However, they occasionally failed to choose the correct object even when they understood the verb. Experiment 2 examined whether this was due to an inability to identify some of the pictures of novel objects. Experiment 3 tested 24 2-year-olds' memory for the newly learned nouns following a 24 hr delay and found significant retention. Results are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that facilitate vocabulary acquisition in young children.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2004

Pediatric interventions to support reading aloud: how good is the evidence?

Pediatricians and family practitioners increasingly provide free picture books and anticipatory guidance about reading aloud as part of routine health supervision for infants and young children, and arrange for volunteers to read aloud to children in the waiting rooms. These interventions comprise the Reach Out and Read (ROR) model, which has been adopted by more than 2000 clinical sites nationally. To date, 12 published studies have evaluated ROR and its variations, including three prospective, controlled trials. All but one have shown associations between ROR and increased reading aloud; additionally, four studies have linked program exposure to clinically meaningful increases in child language. Nonetheless, conclusive evidence of efficacy is lacking. This article provides a systematic, critical review of the literature, focusing on theoretical assumptions, issues of study design and measurement, and directions for future research.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1999

An examination of the development of language in the normal child.

The development of language remains a theoretical mystery in many respects. There are similarities in the work of developmental theorists, physiological theorists and anthropological studies. Knowledge of the normal language development process for paediatric nurses and allied professionals is essential in order to identify the abnormal and therefore ensure early intervention with support services and treatment. Further research from a universal perspective is advocated.

Child Behavior↗
PubMed1999

Maintaining and reintroducing referents in French: cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.

Seven- to eleven-year-old French-speaking children and adults told "silent" comic strip stories that differed by the frame display mode, by the explicitness of the links between depicted events, and whether the topic changed on the last frame. The results showed that (a) the character in the last frame was usually referred to as a given, with a definite pronoun when the topic was maintained and a definite noun phrase or a left dislocation when the topic changed; (b) joint display of frames triggered more pronouns and left dislocations, while single-frame display led to more definite noun phrases; and (c) explicit links gave rise to more pronouns. The production conditions manipulated turned out to be a good means of assessing speakers' acquisition of within-discourse referencing expressions and narrative skills: the children gradually refined and adjusted their use of definite expressions and pronouns, whereas the adults more readily used narration-specific devices.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

"I mell a kunk!" --Evidence that children have more complex representations of word pronunciations which they simplify.

A case study is reported in which a child (3 years; 4 months old) who produced forms such as mell and kunk (for smell and skunk, respectively) was asked to choose between his own forms and correct forms in a comprehension task. The results demonstrate that the child understood the correct forms to be the correct forms, suggesting that the child had greater competence than performance in regard to these phonological forms.

Child Language↗
PubMed1993

A perceptually-based model of children's earliest productions.

A model is proposed to account for processes underlying the initial extraction and representation of words. The model incorporates perceptual salience into a framework provided by autosegmental phonology. In one study, predictions of the model were tested in a corpus of utterances obtained from three children in the one-word speech period. Analyses of the corpus supported the predictions, suggesting that salience of elements such as stressed and final syllables may contribute to the form of early productions and, specifically, to the form of utterances containing filler syllables and full or partial reduplications. Because the data for this study were children's productions, and the model concerns children's representations, a second study was carried out to investigate representations somewhat more directly. That study also explored the possible influence of an additional prosodic factor on the form of early words. A word-learning task with 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds and adults assessed whether children would attend to stress pattern or segmental sequence in identifying the referent for a word. As expected, children did rely on prosody in their word choices far more frequently than did adults, suggesting that one prosodic component, stress pattern, may in some cases be prominent in a child's representation for a word. The results of the two studies provide support for the utility of the autosegmental framework, as well as additional evidence for the perceptual salience of stressed and final syllables and of stress pattern.

Attention↗
PubMed1980

A comparision of nonimitative modeling and mimicry procedures for training the singular copula in black preschool children.

The singular form of the copula was trained in 10 normal four-yr-old Black dialect speakers using two different techniques. One group was trained using mimicry and the other was trained using nonimitative modeling. Multiple naive trainers and picture stimuli were counterbalanced across subjects. The results indicated that the two training methods did not differ significantly in baseline/generalization responses. Implications of this and similar studies are discussed.

Black or African American↗
PubMed2003

What compound nouns mean to preschool children.

Compound nouns have multiple meanings in English. The purpose of this study was to explore when children know that compound nouns refer to two objects, one ideally interacting with the other (e.g., "fish shoes" are shoes with fish on them, not next to them). Thirty-five English-speaking three- and four-year-old children participated in this study. They were given both a production and comprehension task with novel compound nouns. The results showed that the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds were equally likely to produce compounds to name two interacting objects. However, the three-year-olds were less likely than the four-year-olds to understand that a compound referred necessarily to two objects. These results demonstrate that children's knowledge of the meaning of compound nouns is still developing in the preschool years. Three possible interpretations of the mismatch in comprehension and production are discussed: (1). there are modality differences in processing by children, (2). the meaning tapped by production and comprehension is not identical, and (3). the tasks differed in complexity.

Child Language↗