The study involving 35 normal preschoolers suggested that normal preschoolers appear to create faster mappings (rapid creating of lexical representations for unfamiliar words) containing a great deal of linguistic and nonlinguistic information on the basis of even brief, casual encounters with new words. (Author/CL)

The results suggested that although blind children are generally competent in language, they utilize a number of linguistic strategies that differentiate them from sighted language users. (Author)

Analysis of interaction between pairs of deaf and hearing preschoolers indicated that both roles in dialogue (speaker-initiator and speaker-responder) were used by dyads, but their pattern of performance was different. Deaf speaker-initiators displayed a narrower range of complexity in their utterances while deaf speaker-responders were less…

In two experiments, preschoolers interpreted a novel count noun applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level (such as a person or a dog) kind of object rather than to a context (such as a passenger) or a life-phase (such as a puppy) kind of object. (MDM)

Results were that the children's mean length of utterance scores were better for the home sample, although there was no difference between their developmental sentence scores for the home sample and the clinic sample. (Author/SBH)

This article explores the kinds of cues young children use as a basis for extending early works in an effort to label novel referent objects. Proposals that intend to explain how first words are extended and used to refer to objects or events for which no words explicitly exist are discussed. (DF)

This article reviews recent research on phonological development and characteristics associated with different forms of delay. Language-delayed students are considered categorizable at 24 months as either "late talkers" with no major deviations from patterns of normal acquisition or disordered students whose developmental patterns are markedly…

A study analyzed oral narrative and emergent storybook reading by 40 children (half with language impairment) ages 2-4. Children with language impairment were less able to produce language features associated with written language, used past-tense verbs less frequently in both contexts, and used personal pronouns less in the oral narratives.…

Fourteen children (ages 4-6) with specific language impairment produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names. Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace…

A study investigated frequency change and duration of the second formant (F2) transition in speech samples recorded close to stuttering onset in 10 preschoolers who stutter, 10 who recovered from stuttering, and 10 controls. Near stuttering onset, children whose stuttering persisted demonstrated significantly smaller frequency change than the…

Compares teachers' estimates of spontaneous language with direct observations of performance of developmentally delayed preschool children in classroom situations. Teachers tended to be more accurate in their estimation of children with higher spontaneous language frequencies and to underestimate the frequency of spontaneous language in other…

Six autistic children, age 3-6, and 6 children with Down syndrome were followed over a period of 12-26 months. Autistic children followed the same general developmental path as the Down syndrome children in the acquisition of grammatical and lexical aspects of language. (Author/JDD)

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…

At the Iowa School for the Deaf, five young hearing children (age three years) were integrated into the preschool program to study the development of total communication skills including speech and language patterns. (Author/PHR)

Vowel production of a 14-month-old girl was studied over a 6-month period. Sixty percent of the vowels were produced correctly. A complex pattern of vowel preferences and errors was partially related to prespeech babbling preferences and strongly related to word structure variables (monosyllabic versus disyllabic). (Author/JDD)