The paper describes the linguistic/cognitive challenge of answering yes/no questions appropriately. The coping strategies of normally developing children are used as the basis for tutorial suggestions for intervention with the developmentally delayed. (Author/CL)

A review of research on how cognition relates to language in children with language impairments discusses terminology and analyzes the basic mapping problem. Evidence for a variety of hypotheses related to the issue are examined. (CL)

The objectives of this paper are (1) to present the relationship of play to language and cognition, (2) to describe the stages of play and discuss recent literature about the characteristics of play, and (3) to describe the use of play with the multifaceted goals of cognition, pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and morphology as an intervention…

The study evaluated the metalinguistic awareness of words, syllables, and sounds of 15 language-disordered children (age three to six). Ss performed significantly poorer than controls (normally developing children) in dividing sentences and words. The language-disordered children also did not show the same level of responses to the word-awareness…

Performance of 30 children (retarded, nonretarded, and language impaired) on nonlinguistic symbolic and conceptual cognitive tasks was measured. The performance of the retarded and nonretarded groups was essentially similar, while both of these groups generally performed at higher stage levels than did the language impaired group. (Author/CL)

Forty-four language delayed preschoolers received either direct instruction or interactive instruction. After 8 months, children in both settings improved significantly and substantially on syntactic and semantic measures. There were no differences between the two groups at posttest nor any significant aptitude by treatment interactions for…

The nature and development of discourse topic skills in preschool children are examined and illustrated by observations of very young children. Possible social and cognitive components are explored with implications for language-disordered populations. (CL)

Study data point to a significant difference between the ability of normal and language-disabled children at the holophrastic stage to use their lexicon to communicate to a listener in a context. (MP)

In response to Leonard (EC 600 867), two aspects of language development are identified in which the discrepancies between domains of language and/or cognitive development often observed in specific language impairment children occur naturally as a consequence of individual variation in rate of development together with relative independence of…

This study examined the acquisition of verb particles and prepositions in language-impaired, language-matched, and age-matched preschool children (total n=42). Results indicated that the use of verb particles constituted a particularly challenging task for the language-impaired subjects relative to both the age-matched and language-matched peers.…

The study compared the use of language functions and language interactions in a structured setting with normal and language-disordered preschoolers. Language disordered children performed less appropriately on the average across all measures and the difference between groups was greater at younger ages. (Author/DB)

Three 5-year-old Japanese children with no meaningful words were the subjects of an intervention program. The subjects and therapists played the "shopping game" (in the first term) and the "riding car game" (in the second term) with rules within the subjects' cognitive ability and in a setting designed to facilitate…

The acquisition of spatial terms in the language development of young children is examined. Two primary theories of word meaning and concept acquisition are reviewed, followed by a summary of current developmental research on spatial terms and factors influencing acquisition. Finally, guidelines for the assessment and teaching of spatial terms are…

This study, which assessed hypothesis-testing abilities using a discrimination-learning paradigm, found that 16 language-impaired primary-level children solved fewer problems than 16 controls equated on cognitive level, but the 2 groups used similar hypothesis types to solve the problems. Type of verbal feedback (explicit versus nonexplicit) did…

This longitudinal study videotaped six preschool children with various developmental delays, including language delays, during free play and modeling tasks, and examined whether reported parallels between symbolic play and normal language development were evidenced. Results supported previous reports, although variability across observations was…