This study explored the conceptual status of metalinguistic ability by determining whether or not metalinguistic ability can account for variation in early reading achievement independently of more general language abilities. First-grade children were given a test battery assessing phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, syntactic proficiency, word decoding ability, and reading comprehension ability. Strong zero-order correlations were observed among all experimental measures. However, multiple regression analyses revealed that metalinguistic ability did not contribute to the prediction of early reading achievement when general language ability effects were statistically controlled.

This study examined the relationship between parent's feeding practices and the feeding behavior of toddlers and preschool-age children with (n = 19) or without (n = 26) persistent feeding difficulties. Specifically, patterns of parent-child interaction were assessed during standardized family mealtime observations in the clinic. Parents also kept observational records of their children's mealtime behavior at home and rated the degree of difficulty they experienced in feeding their child during each meal on a daily basis. Observational results showed that feedingdisordered children engaged in higher levels of disruptive mealtime behavior (food refusal, noncompliance, complaining, oppositional behavior, and playing with food) and lower levels of chewing during mealtime. There were several significant age effects, with younger children (under age 3) engaging in more vomiting and less aversive demanding and verbalizations. Parents of feeding-disordered children were more negative and coercive in their feeding practices and engaged in higher levels of aversive instruction giving, aversive prompting, and negative eating-related comments. There were several significant associations between coercive parental behaviors and children's food refusal and noncompliance in the sample as a whole. Measures of children's disruptiveness at mealtimes in the clinic were significantly correlated with measures of mealtime behavior in the home.

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