Past studies of autistic children's memory for linguistic materials have shown that autistics have a special linguistic coding difficulty. Because the autistic deficit stems from a failure to use semantic and syntactic knowledge or from a failure to acquire such forms, future research should explore the mechanics underlying this deficit. (PJM)

Explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. The study suggests that even language-delayed six year olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between the groups studied (first graders, young adults, language-delayed first graders) are discussed. (55…

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. Most of the studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. (Contains 58 references.) (JL)

Attempts to demonstrate that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children can be viewed as normal learners faced with systematically altered input. By assuming SLI children are limited in their ability to perceive and hypothesize grammatical morphemes that are low in phonetic substance, many features of SLI children's language can be explained by…

Two investigations of preschool children's relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information to discriminate between speech acts revealed that younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, while older subjects' performance was adversely affected. (Author/CB)