In the UK there is much concern about the educational progress of children from areas of significant social disadvantage entering primary school with impoverished language skills. These children are not routinely referred to speech and language therapy services and therefore education practitioners in schools deliver intervention to facilitate…

Cutting-edge in its approach and international in its authorship, this fourth monograph in a series sponsored by the Chinese Language Teachers Association features eight research studies that explore a variety of themes, topics, and perspectives important to a variety of stakeholders in the Chinese language learning community. Employing a wide…

Twenty-one apparently normal children (ages 18 to 34 months) with slow expressive language acquisition were evaluated initially and again at age 3. The late talkers also scored significantly lower in receptive communication and socialization. Followup showed nearly half the group remained delayed in expressive communication and socialization,…

Five children with severe educational retardation, aged 5-12, were involved in sign training in which the spoken words corresponding to signs were receptively known to participants. Whether signs were taught concurrently or in a serial fashion, signs taught by total communication were acquired faster than those taught by sign-alone training.…

Four developmentally delayed preschoolers were taught action-object responses in receptive and expressive language modalities, using matrix-training procedures. Acquisition of a word combination rule was facilitated by the use of familiar lexical items, whereas subsequent acquisition of new lexical knowledge was enhanced by couching training in a…

Two five-year-old children with profound hearing impairments were involved in a conditional discrimination task. They were taught to relate manual signs, pictures, and printed words in a nominal matching-to-sample task in such a way that equivalent stimuli resulted. Results showed that the establishment of equivalence relations can promote…

While neuropsychology relates the neural structures damaged in traumatic brain injury with their cognitive functions in daily life, this report reviews evidence that elementary operations of cognition as defined by cognitive studies are the level at which the brain localizes its computations. Orienting of visual attention is used as a model task.…

Examines the impact of specific language delay (LD) on peer interaction in preschool children. Interaction between three groups of dyads (normals and normals; normals and LD children; and between LD children) were studied. Normal children were more likely to initiate interaction with non-responsive partners and to dominate the interaction.…

The relationship between children's early experience with otitis media with effusion, hearing over time, and emerging receptive and expressive language skills was assessed. Better language was found to be associated with better average hearing levels, suggesting that the relationship between otitis media with effusion and language is mediated by…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of video instruction in teaching the meanings and uses of idioms to 20 deaf adolescents. Students improved their knowledge and use of idioms more when exposed to the video/discussion approach than to the lecture/discussion approach. (DB)

Two experiments investigated the effects of peer modeling on the acquisition of receptive and expressive language responses. Experiment 1 studied lexical learning among five children who were mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. Experiment 2 investigated the observational learning of receptive and expressive language responses by two…

Noun and verb comprehension of 11 children with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments was assessed by presenting a linguistic stimulus and determining whether the child watched a video event that matched or did not match the stimulus. Subjects, aged 2-6, watched the match significantly more, especially when dynamic visual stimuli were…

Progressive time delay is presented as a nonintrusive method of teaching receptive vocabulary to a 5-year-old girl with severe mental retardation. The girl was trained in pointing to photographs of various unfamiliar objects when the object was named by the teacher. Results indicate that the presentation of a time delay procedure resulted in a…

Attempts to identify deficits in object knowledge specific to the autistic syndrome. Examines the correspondence between sensorimotor and play behaviors and language in mentally retarded and normal children. Determines whether these correspondences are different for autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children.(Author/AS)

An alternating treatments design was used to evaluate and compare the instructional effectiveness of six treatment packages in teaching receptive picture vocabulary to 12 mildly handicapped children (ages 3-6 years). Independent variables in the treatment packages included: least-to-most prompting, correction, group instruction, and individual…