Questioning others is one of the most powerful methods that children use to learn about the world. How does questioning develop? How is it socialized? And how can questioning be leveraged to support learning and education? In this volume, some of the world's leading experts are brought together to explore critical issues in the development of…

This study used a performance-based model to investigate the impact of discourse demands on the pattern of morphosyntactic deficits exhibited by 10 children with specific language impairments (SLI). Findings suggest distinct deficit profiles for subgroups of children with SLI differing in receptive language abilities, not evident when syntactic…

In this article, the authors examine two distinct but closely related fields, research on teaching and research on teacher education. Despite its roots in research on teaching, research in teacher education has developed in isolation both from mainstream research on teaching and from research on higher education and professional education. A…

Approaches to the analysis of utterance disruptions are reviewed, and a system is proposed for analyzing disruptions in spontaneous language, with four disruption categories (pauses, repetitions, revisions, and orphans). Use of the system is illustrated using language samples from 10 traumatically brain-injured and 10 normally developing speakers…

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

Systems for classifying speakers' communicative intents are typically limited in scope, in applicability across the full developmental range of language abilities and disabilities, and in their theoretical foundations. Criteria for an adequate system for analyzing communicative intents are discussed, and a system is proposed which meets those…

Verbal and figurative classification tasks were presented to 30 blind and 30 sighted children (ages 6 to 11). Although younger blind children were significantly less efficient on tasks, older ones reached or were close to the level of their sighted peers. Analysis illustrates how the blind children adjusted their conceptual knowledge to their…

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

The taxonomy developed by J. Klecan-Aker et al. to investigate the use of various speech acts in response to questions during a structured picture-description task was evaluated. Results indicated that the taxonomy was sufficient to handle the responses of a group of 12 language-impaired children, aged 7-11. (JDD)

Children (ages 9-13) with language-learning disabilities were administered 5 types of verbal analogies: synonyms, antonyms, linear order, category membership, and functional relationship. Subjects performed worse than mental age-matched children on all types of analogies and performed worse than language age-matched children on all types except…

A study examined the identification of distinct subgroups of learning-disabled young adults based on their ability to generate written language. Two subgroups of learning-disabled college students, the language strong/visually weak (N=22) and the visually strong/language weak (N=10), were identified based on evaluation of 32 essays. Subjects were…

This review of research discusses how children with autism may acquire equivalence classes after learning to supply a common oral name to each stimulus in a potential class. A proposed methodology for researching referent naming and class formation, analysis of stimulus classes, and generalization is offered. (CR)

This sourcebook is intended to provide researchers and users of natural language computer systems with a classification scheme to describe language-related problems associated with such systems. Methods from the disciplines of artificial intelligence (AI), education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and psychometrics were applied in an…

While traditional views of literacy assume that discourse is either written or oral, an alternative perspective considers different discourse samples as part of the linguistic repertoire of the speech community. Placing this perspective in a sociolinguistic context and taking language use rather than form as the starting point for analysis, it is…