In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words.…

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]-14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used…

Attempts to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it, focusing on its use in the domain of schizophrenic speech, to provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations. (Author/CB)

Investigated the use of complex syntax in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down Syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple…

Observation of language patterns parents used with their verbal (N=6) or nonverbal (N=6) autistic children revealed that mothers and fathers appeared sensitive to their child's language needs, but differed in how they accommodated them. Mothers used shorter mean lengths of utterance, more prompts, and fewer direct directives than fathers.…

Analysis of psychiatric patients' utterances during an interview indicated that the percentage of unclear cohesive ties was significantly higher among schizophrenics than in a group of patients with mixed diagnoses (mostly affective disorders). Cohesive weakness was a more frequent characteristic of the language of schizophrenic speakers.…

Using a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, this study distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response…

Both normal (N=19) and language-disordered (N=19) 7- to 10 year-olds used a higher rate of acceptable departures (during recall of text) from the original meaning than any other type of departure with normal children, producing a higher rate of acceptable departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable…

When lexical availability was manipulated through discourse support and word frequency for 40 target nouns, measurement of effects on length, complexity, order of mention, and fluency of 4- to 8-year-olds' utterances showed that the number and length of responses containing the target word varied with age, word frequency, and discourse support…

School-aged, hearing-impaired children's propensity for incorporating complex syntax into the narratives and conversations they produced was investigated. Language samples containing both conversations and narratives in the form of story retellings were collected from seven subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing losses. (48 references) (VWL)

Comparison of oral and written language samples collected from young and elderly adults revealed an age-related decrease in language complexity. Better-educated subjects had higher vocabulary test scores and produced longer utterances. Subjects with greater memory capacity produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching…

Observation of reticent (N=7) and normal talkative (N=7) kindergarten students with their teachers during classroom "sharing time" indicated that reticent children engaged in less complex speech than their peers, speaking more often about objects in the "here and now," speaking about one topic at a turn, and speaking in shorter…

Reports on a longitudinal study of the relationship between productive phonological ability and awareness in children under the age of six. The study followed 45 subjects with variant productive phonology levels from the mean age of 3 years, 6 months to 6 years, 0 months. As a child matures in productive phonology, accompanying exponential growth…

Three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs were analyzed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Results revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies and that imitation aided the children in learning the lexicon, making phonological approximations of…