Many schools encourage deaf children to speak and sign simultaneously; however, there have been no satisfactory descriptions of this behavior. The research reported in this paper explored the correspondence between speech and sign and the resulting correspondence of the messages conveyed by each channel. The results suggest a synergistic model for this bimodally coded form of English.

Children's responses to verbal instructions to place objects in, on, or under other objects were examined according to the paradigm developed by Clark (1973). In the present study, however, all objects were unfamiliar to the children, and were completely neutral and context-free. An additional task assessed children's comprehension of the spatial terms by asking them simply to point to objects in particular relationships without actually manipulating them. The results supported Clark's hypothesis of the influence of non-linguistic strategies on younger children's responses, in contradistinction to other studies critical of Clark's findings. However, when not required to manipulate the objects, children indicated greater comprehension than otherwise expected. The results are discussed in relation to the influence of task context on comprehension studies of this type.

What does the word chair mean? How does the category of objects bearing this name differ between adults and pre-school children? And how does the knowledge of a possible function of an object affect subjects' judgements? Answers to these questions were sought by means of sorting and rank ordering tasks. Subjects were shown drawings of a variety of objects on which one could sit, and were asked to indicate which ones they would call chairs. Those objects so judged to be category members were rank ordered for degree of typicality (or ‘best example’) by a paired-comparisons procedure. Half the subjects saw drawings of the objects alone, while the others saw a person sitting on each object. The results revealed that adults consistently judged some objects to be better examples than others, and that the provision of function information affected the judgements in a characteristic way. A different, less stable typicality structure was found in the children's category. Function cues caused the children's rank order judgements to change greatly. These findings are discussed within the framework of some recent theories of lexical concept formation in young children, and in relation to recent work on the nature of internal representations.