Three bedtime soliloquies of an eight-year-old echolalic autistic child were analyzed along the dimensions of echolia versus propositional speech, types of ungrammaticality produced, and analysis of connected discourse. (Author/SBH)

Observation of five infants' vocalizations during their first 30 weeks showed that hearing impaired infants displayed different language patterns than normally hearing infants. Developmental differences in vocal activity were observed by six weeks, suggesting that hearing impaired infants may differ from unimpaired infants earlier than has been…

The study identified communicative patterns of preschool children (N=11) with handicaps (Down's Syndrome, specific language impairments, and autism). Down's Syndrome children were like normal children of the same language stage on all parameters whereas autistic children scored outside the normal range on all but one parameter. (Author/DB)

In two studies involving seven developmentally disabled children aged 7-14, phonetic sounds and syntactic structures representing different levels of normal development were taught. Results showed that the children's sequence of learning language forms followed the normal developmental model (e.g., earlier emerging forms were acquired in fewer…

A longitudinal study was conducted using 18 mildly/moderately retarded 14- and 15-year-olds to investigate word knowledge acquisition and subcategorization features of the words. Retarded children's errors were highly correlated with word frequency. Two interpretations (gradual acquisition of word knowledge and a reorganization theory) are…