This study investigated the relationship between control and coreference using an act-out task involving 81 children ranging in age from 3;1 to 8;0 and eight adults ranging in age from 30 to 55. The results replicated previous findings in revealing five developmental stages in children's interpretation of PRO, an empty pronominal element. A significant relationship was observed in the patterns of children's interpretation of forwards sentences containing PRO and those containing overt pronouns. However, there was no relationship in the development of restrictions on control and restrictions on coreference.
The authors of this article report on a preliminary study of 18, 4-and 5-year-old children, followed by a longitudinal study of 44 children, who were tested in the first, second, and third grades. The children's ability to detect the ambiguity of lexically ambiguous sentences (e.g., "The children saw the bat lying by the fence") and structurally ambiguous sentences (e.g., "The girl tickled the baby with the teddy bear") was assessed in the preliminary study and in Experiments 1 and 2, which were conducted when the children were in the first and second grades, respectively. Ambiguity detection skill was found to be related to first-grade reading readiness and to second-and third-grade reading achievement. The results suggest that the detection of lexical ambiguity develops in first grade, correlates highly with reading readiness measures, and is a strong predictor of secondgrade reading ability, indicating that it is a precursor of reading skill. In this study, the ability to detect structural ambiguity emerged in second grade and was a predictor of third-grade reading ability. Clinical implications for the use of ambiguity detection tasks to identify children who are at risk for reading difficulty are discussed.The acquisition of metalinguistic skills in middle to late childhood has long been an important area of research in typical first-language development. Initially, this interest was motivated by the fact that metalinguistic development involves an intersection of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive systems.
Seventy-seven 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were presented with well-formed and ill-formed versions of 10 different sentence types. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences and correct the ill-formed ones. The sentences were presented in an interview format, developed by Cairns (1990, 1996). Both grammaticality judgment and correction ability improved with age. It is argued that the ability to make grammaticality judgments and to correct ill-formed sentences reflects the child's developing ability to access syntactic knowledge consciously and to employ that knowledge in the processing of sentences.
BACKGROUND:The Communication Disorders and Nursing Programs conducted a pilot study to examine the value of peer review as an educational strategy to improve graduate student writing and understanding of course assignments. PARTICIPANTS: Graduate students enrolled in a communication disorders diagnostic process course, a health policy course, or a philosophical foundations course (N = 120). METHODS: Students participated as a peer reviewer for their final assignment. The reviewer read the draft assignment and provided comments. Additionally, nursing students read their papers out loud to the peer reviewer. Students submitted their draft assignment to their professor. The nursing drafts were graded. Students revised and submitted the final assignment for a grade. Students completed a questionnaire at the end of the course to provide feedback about the value of peer review. RESULTS: A 65% response rate was obtained. Students (89.9%) felt that the draft was helpful, the partner was helpful (70.9%), and 78.5% incorporated the suggestions of the peer reviewer. Overall, grades improved from the draft version to the final version for each assignment. CONCLUSION: The pilot study showed that peer review was an effective educational strategy to improve student grades and conceptual understanding of the material.
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