In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Common problems in using and scoring the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure to quantify young children's grammatic structure expressive language are reviewed. Scoring examples are provided to help clinicians learn the DDS procedure. (Author/CL)

Content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) revealed differences in the nature of perceptual and conceptual items. Both language-impaired and normal-language children performed significantly better on perceptual-type than conceptual-type items. The predominance of perceptual items was…

The report describes a Prescreening Checklist which has been used to supplement speech, hearing, and language screening tests of preschool children. The Checklist is designed to gain information from the preschool teacher about the child's linguistic functioning in the classroom. (Author/PHR)

Discusses the administration of the Test di Attitudine Linguistica per Bambini (TALB) to students 7-9 years of age. Correlations between the TALB and achievement tests administered at the end of the course were very high. It is concluded that aptitude is a main factor in successful learning of a second language. (16 references) (LET)

Ninety-three indigenous Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian preschoolers were screened for hearing dysfunction; approximately 85 percent of the children failed the screening, which included pure-tone audiometry, tympanometry, and otoscopy. The research literature indicates that from 30 to 35% of all children experience recurring episodes of…

This case study describes a criterion-referenced method of assessing the speech and language of a young child who speaks an uncommon or unfamiliar English dialect. The method, Parent Child Comparative Analysis, involves administering an identical test battery to parent and child and interpreting the child's performance in relation to the parent's.…

This document consists of the three issues of the journal "Learning Languages" published during volume year 3. These issues contain the following major articles: "A National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL): A Brief History, 1987-1997;""Juguetes Fantasticos" (Mari Haas); "A Perspective on the Cultural…

The handbook is designed as a practical reference for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers, curriculum developers, teacher trainers, and student teachers. It provides basic information on the background of ESL programs and current information on publications, standards, and special materials for elementary and secondary school ESL. It does…