Forms Of Children Research Articles

Niños, fiestas patronales e identidad local

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la participación infantil en las fiestas patronales de Yucatán, México, y mostrar la importancia de esta participación en la construcción de la identidad de los niños. La investigación etnográfica realizada para el cumplimiento de tal objetivo se orientó a la captación de las voces infantiles en contextos cotidianos y festivos mediante el diálogo y la convivencia. A pesar de que el artículo no profundiza en una fiesta patronal en particular, da cuenta de la apropiación infantil de este tipo de celebraciones y visibiliza las formas infantiles de consumo, interpretación y apropiación del patrimonio, que han sido descuidadas en estudios previos sobre el tema. Así, se concluye que, en espacios lúdicos, los niños resignifican el patrimonio festivo y lo cargan de afectos y emociones, lo cual refuerza la identidad comunitaria de estos.

Development of Auxiliaries in Young Children Learning African American English.

We examined language samples of young children learning African American English (AAE) to determine if and when their use of auxiliaries shows dialect-universal and dialect-specific effects. The data were longitudinal language samples obtained from two children, ages 18 to 36 months, and three children, ages 33 to 51 months. Dialect-universal analyses examined age of first form and early uses of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries. Dialect-specific analyses focused on rates of overt marking by auxiliary type and syntactic construction and for BE by surface form and succeeding element. Initial production of auxiliaries occurred between 19 and 24 months. The children's forms were initially restricted and produced in syntactically simple constructions. Over time, they were expanded in ways that showed their rates of marking to vary by auxiliary type, their rates of BE and DO marking to vary by syntactic construction, and their rates of BE marking to vary by surface form and succeeding element. Development of auxiliaries by young children learning AAE shows both dialect-universal and dialect-specific effects. The findings are presented within a development chart to guide clinicians in the assessment of children learning AAE and in the treatment of AAE-speaking children with language impairment.

Short Article: Hebb Learning, Verbal Short-Term Memory, and the Acquisition of Phonological forms in Children

Recent work using the Hebb effect as a marker for implicit long-term acquisition of serial order has demonstrated a functional equivalence across verbal and visuospatial short-term memory. The current study extends this observation to a sample of five- to six-year-olds using verbal and spatial immediate serial recall and also correlates the magnitude of Hebb learning with explicit measures of word and nonword paired-associate learning. Comparable Hebb effects were observed in both domains, but only nonword learning was significantly related to the magnitude of Hebb learning. Nonword learning was also independently related to individuals' general level of verbal serial recall. This suggests that vocabulary acquisition depends on both a domain-specific short-term memory system and a domain-general process of learning through repetition.

Narrativas infantis: um estudo de caso em uma instituição infantil

Enfrentando a pedagogia tradicional adultocêntrica, uma professora de Educação Infantil conduz projetos com a participação das crianças em uma sala com áreas diversificadas para brincandeiras livres. Ao utilizar a abordagem de projetos integrada aos pressupostos do High/Scope, a professora valoriza os saberes e as narrativas das crianças durante a construção de uma bruxa com caixa de papelão. O caso focaliza narrativas contendo expressões verbais de natureza binária, típicas do processo de categorização da criança, pesquisadas por Bruner e similares às do pensamento selvagem analisado por Lévi-Strauss. O contexto da pesquisa: espaço físico da sala de atividade, reformulado em 2003, conforme pressupostos do modelo curricular High/Scope e enriquecido com a Abordagem de Projetos. A pesquisa, qualitativa, configura um estudo de caso instrumental, colaborativo, em que uma professora de uma escola municipal de Educação Infantil da cidade de São Paulo desenvolve, com crianças de quatro anos, a prática de contar história em um ambiente que estimula a cooperação, o lúdico e as narrativas. Os resultados indicam que, segundo concepções brunerianas, as narrativas infantis binárias, como bruxa boa e má, morar perto e longe, caixa grande e pequena, evidenciam estruturas típicas do pensamento infantil, que auxiliam no processo de categorização de situações do cotidiano. Práticas de contar histórias, de ouvir a criança e de criar espaço para a recriação de narrativas são coerentes com pedagogias que respeitam as formas de representação do mundo da criança, como a abordagem de projetos.

Homonymy in the lexicons of young children acquiring American Sign Language.

The incidence of homonymy in children's early sign language production was examined in nine young children of deaf parents. Analysis of parental reports of how their children formed their signs revealed that all of the children produced homonymous forms (i.e., a single manual form used to represent two or more different adult target signs). Altogether, the children were reported as producing 26 sets of homonymous forms to represent 59 adult target signs. This incidence of homonymy in the children's early signing did not differ significantly from the incidence of homonymy previously reported in a study of normally developing children acquiring spoken language. This finding is interpreted as indicating an important similarity in language acquisition processes across language modalities. Analysis of the sign formational characteristics of the children's homonymous forms revealed that the children's signs and the adult target signs typically shared a common location aspect. The movement and handshape aspects of the adult target signs were less frequently retained in the children's homonymous forms.

Evaluation of the Sheidow Park social problem solving program for primary school children: a field study

Research has demonstrated links between children's poor peer relations and various forms of child and adult psychosocial maladjustment. Social skills training programs have been developed to increase children's social competence and reduce the risk for later problems. The Sheidow Park Social Problem Solving Program is a curriculum based cognitive social skills training program, designed for Australian primary school children. The present research evaluated the effects of this program on a variety of dimensions of children's social competence. Subjects were Reception/Year 1 children in two classes of a South Australian suburban primary school. The teacher of one class implemented the social skills program, while the other class experienced no formal social skills intervention. The results indicated that the various measures of social competence employed were relatively independent of one another, supporting the need for a comprehensive range of measures in social skills training research. The Sheidow Park program demonstrated a significant effect on children's sense of social self-competence and the degree to which they perceived a variety of challenging social situations as difficult to deal with. However, the program had no effect on teacher and peer ratings of children's social competence or on children's satisfaction with their wider social network. The findings are explained within the context of attribution and cognitive dissonance theories, and the strengths and limitations of both the Sheidow Park program and the present research are discussed. Suggestions for future research and modifications to the program are made.

Children's understanding of their own phonological forms.

The ability of young children to understand their own and other children's deviant phonological forms was tested. Children were better at understanding an unfamiliar adult's speech than they were at understanding their own or other childrens’ speech. Their understanding was found to be related to the degree to which the deviant speech resembled the adult phonological form. It was concluded that children do not store their own deviant phonological forms for recognition in the same way that they store adult forms.

Performing without competence

ABSTRACTSpeech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of children's question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a child's linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the child's growing linguistic knowledge.

SOCIAL CONTROL OF FORM DIVERSITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW FORMS IN CHILDREN'S BLOCKBUILDING1

The blockbuilding behavior of three preschool girls was analyzed in terms of the forms manifest in any completed block construction, and found to contain few different forms in baseline sessions. Social reinforcement, given contingent on the production of any form not previously constructed within the current session (i.e., every first appearance of any form within a session was reinforced but no subsequent appearances of that form within that session were), increased the number of different forms built per sessions. Social reinforcement, given for all second and later appearances within the session, decreased the number of different forms built per session. Furthermore, it was found that new forms (forms never seen before in the child's total prior sequence of blockbuilding sessions) emerged at higher rates during periods of reinforcement of different forms (first appearances) than during periods of baseline or reinforcement of same forms (second and later appearances).