Hesitation serves many purposes, allowing us to choose and combine words better, make discourse more cohesive and regulate its flow, and think. Frequency and length varies with the cognitive activity, but is not always easy to interpret. Foreign language instruction can help students interpret hesitations and use them to advantage. (MSE)

Eight preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 30 nonimpaired children were selected on the basis of specified mean length of utterance (MLU) ranges and compared on word class production. The high-MLU and low-MLU groups of SLI children could not be empirically differentiated based on their word class profiles, whereas the…

A study examined the manner in which 10 specifically language-impaired children and their linguistically normal chronological age-matched peers repaired overlapping speech. Conversational samples from each student were elicited by an adult examiner. (26 references) (Author/CB)

Describes a follow-up study of 25 boys who had been diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Delay (SELD) at 24 to 30 months of age. At three to four years, half of the boys continued to exhibit poor expressive language skills, suggesting that young children diagnosed with SELD are at considerable risk for continuing language problems. (33…

Assessment of spontaneous language samples for word-finding characteristics of language-disordered (N=28) and non-disordered (N=28) 7- to 12-year-olds indicated that non-disordered subjects produced significantly more total verbalizations and a greater modified mean length of utterance score than the subjects with word-finding problems. (CB)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

Investigates the inconsistencies of personal pronoun production both in production and between production and comprehension in a pronoun-reversing child. (EKN)

The paper presents a case study of a language-impaired child who invented a unique morphologic rule for signaling the distinction between English singular and plural nouns. This example is offered as further support of a model of language acquisition that emphasizes the cognitive aspects underlying linguistic regularities in child language.…

This study of 80 autistic (ages 6-18), mentally handicapped, and normal children found that more autistic subjects used neologisms and idiosyncratic language than age- and language-skill-matched control groups. More autistic children used words inappropriately that were neither phonologically nor conceptually related to intended English words than…

Revised methods of scoring the Token Test and Reporter's Test were developed to accommodate specific types of errors committed by language-disordered children during a previous standardization study. Test modifications are explained as are the results of administering the revised tests to both normal and language-disordered school-aged children.…

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…

Investigates language-normal one-year-olds' (N=14) and language-impaired two- and three-year-olds' (N=10) acquisition of words referring to three types of action. Findings revealed that, although both groups produced few of the words, the language-normal subjects comprehended the different types of action, whereas the impaired subjects did not.…

Eighteen language disabled kindergarteners participated in a five-month intervention program emphasizing the development of expressive grammar. Ss made significant gains in expressive syntax, receptive morphology, expressive language, and one aspect of receptive language. Control Ss only made significant gains in one aspect of receptive language.…

The Test of Language Development was administered to a purposive sample of early elementary learning disabled students in an effort to analyze their language performance. Statistically significant differences were indexed between receptive and expressive language skills for this sample. (Author)

The study investigated the relationship among the grammatical distinctions produced by three language-delayed or language-disordered children on the expressive part of the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test, the Carrow Elicited Language Inventory, and the Menyuk Sentences and those generated in a spontaneous language sample. (PHR)