Language samples were elicited from 18 kindergarten and 18 second-grade students, using three variations of an imperative sentence language sampling procedure. (Author/CL)

A comparison of pragmatic criteria (such as nonfluencies, revisions, delays, and inappropriate shifts) and traditionally employed surface-oriented criteria (morphological and syntactic structures) with 10 bilingual children (six to eight years old) referred for special education evaluation revealed that pragmatic criteria were superior predictors…

The study examined whether an animal naming task would discriminate between 286 normal students (grades K-9) and 123 language disordered students (5-16 years old). The task was of a free and controlled association type for identifying word retrieval problems. Each subject (S) was administered the task individually in the school or clinic setting.…

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…

To investigate the ability of 35 mothers to describe the language skills of their preschool children referred to a diagnostic center, mothers completed the Verbal Language Development Scale and children were tested on the Utah Test of Language Development. (Author/CL)

Two methods of identifying language disordered children were examined in a study involving 54 regular kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers in two Albuquerque schools serving 1,212 children (assigned on a roughly matched basis to one of two groups). (Author/PHR)

Analyzed diagnostic problem-solving behavior of expert practitioners in learning disabilities field. Performed log sequence analysis on thinking-aloud protocols of reading experts (N=17) assessing two randomly assigned pupils with reading and spelling problems. Found: (1) information gathering by experts not guided by theory; (2) much information…

A study with 10 developmentally delayed children between the ages of 52 and 80 months found that test-retest samples resulted in greater variability for lexical and morphological measurements than split-half transcripts. It was also found that 50-utterance sample segments contained 70-80 percent of the lexical information found in 100-utterance…

Features useful in distinguishing 20 children with clinically diagnosed pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) from 40 children with autism or language disorder were developed from a retrospective chart review using 80 items. The most useful items were then evaluated using a second set of cases (total n=120). Fewer items discriminated PDD from…

Comparison of the narratives of 16 children with word-finding problems and 16 normal children (grades 1-6) found that children with word-finding disorders did not differ in language productivity but manifested significantly more word-finding characteristics in their narratives. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed. (Author/DB)

To address the need for objective evaluation of parent-child interactions, the investigators created a taxonomy of interactional behaviors used by parents and preverbal/early verbal children. Based on statistical analysis, the taxonomy was shortened to include only those objective behaviors that were highly correlated with the overall subjective…

The article presents a protocol for the assessment of prelinguistic intentional communication with young and/or severely language-impaired children. A set of tasks and scoring procedures are presented for the elicitation of proto-declarative and proto-imperative behaviors. Data are presented to support reliability. (Author/CL)

The ability of school-age, language-impaired children to respond when faced with a communicative obstacle was investigated. Eighteen language-impaired children were compared to two control groups, age-mates and language-mates. The language-impaired communicated more effectively than younger language-mates and less effectively than age-mates.…

A six-year-old with a language problem responded consistently to 100 locative commands by putting objects in containers and on flat surfaces regardless of the preposition or order of the nouns in the commands. (Author/CL)

The report describes activities and results of a project to identify communication characteristics that would help match augmentative communication system (ACS) capabilities to the needs of nonoral children. Ss had a variety of handicapping conditions, including cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities. Introductory sections cover the…