The study found that 8 language-impaired 3-year-old children were less likely than 10 normally developing children to apply unusual sound changes to words with the potential for homonymy, suggesting they are limited in their ability to capitalize on the phonetic regularities of language. (Author/DB)

A study of 21 patients with Alzheimer's Disease and 25 with vascular dementia, the two most common forms of dementia, investigated language impairments in the dementia syndrome to see if analysis of language disturbances is helpful in differential diagnosis. Diagnostic assessment included a neurological examination, detailed medical history,…

Types of utterances (with locative action utterances specifically differentiated) were evaluated in a language-impaired child tracked between one year, six months and three years of age. Comparison with utterances in other children suggests the importance of such a fine-grained analysis in detecting semantic properties of child language…

The FG syndrome is characterized by unusual facies; sudden infant death; developmental delay; and abnormalities of the cardiac, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems. Serial evaluations of one case with isolated agenesis of the corpus callosum found consistent patterns over time in specific language impairments in syntactic and…

The study, with 15 language-learning-disabled and 15 normally achieving children (ages 6-8), found a significant positive correlation between the severity of the language disability and accuracy on 2 of 3 imagery tasks. Performance on one imagery task was significantly related to reading achievement, and imagery ability was related more strongly…

The review of studies on parental language to language-impaired children cites methodological problems and discusses findings on the following topics: parental effects on language development, the importance of discourse contingencies, (semantic contingencies, acknowledgments, and parental self-repititions), sentence types and associated…

The Test of Problem Solving (TOPS) was evaluated by 20 speech-language clinicians based on designer claims that the test assesses integration of semantic, linguistic, and reasoning ability and taps skills needed for academic and social acceptance. Results challenged the content validity of the test. (Author/DB)

A theoretical framework is presented for understanding difficulties in foreign language learning, based upon a linguistic coding model that hypothesizes deficits in phonological, syntactic, and semantic information processing. Incidence of linguistic coding problems in 22 college-enrolled or college-bound students who petitioned to have the…

This article on sampling early semantic productions reports a study of 6 children (ages 31-35 months) with specific language impairments. Subjects produced a greater frequency and diversity of multiword utterances in a free-play sampling situation than in a joint action routine sampling situation. (JDD)

This study compared (1) performance on language skills and phonological process measures by 41 kindergarten children with speech/language impairments, and (2) their reading ability in first grade. Children with semantic-syntactic language deficits exhibited more difficulties in reading than did children with articulation impairments. Phonological…