This study compared pragmatic skills of 5 children (ages 4-6) with specific language impairments (SLI) and their younger siblings matched for mean length of utterance. Analysis of communicative acts on three levels (social interchange, speech act, and conversational) indicated comparable performance within sibling pairs, but SLI children…

Free speech of subjects with somatization and paranoia was analyzed to identify and compare self-concept dimensions reflected in their lexical choices. The somatization disorder group conveyed a sense of negativism, distress, and preoccupation with an uncertain self-identity. The paranoid patients portrayed an artificially positive, grandiose…

This study, involving 20 children (ages 4-11) with severe hearing impairments, affirmed the content validity of the Clark-Madison Test of Oral Language as a measure of nonwritten expressive language with hearing-impaired children. Performance comparison with hearing individuals revealed a different profile of strengths and weaknesses than did…

Ten head-injured adults were compared to normal adults on a narrative picture description task. Subjects were similar in amount of pertinent content expressed, narrative length, and rate of speech, but were significantly slower in rate of information imparted as they required lengthier and slower verbal outputs to convey essential information.…

This research is testing the suggestion that acquisition and representation of formal language knowledge of dysphasic children is qualitatively different from the normal language acquisition/representation processes. In a cohort-sequential design, aspects of language and cognitive development of 120 dysphasic children aged 6-14 are being analyzed…

Twelve learning-disabled children, aged 8-11, were compared with normal peers on various discourse errors. No significant quantitative differences were found in the total number of discourse errors between the disabled and normal groups, but the errors were qualitatively different. Male subjects made significantly more errors than female subjects.…

This article on sampling early semantic productions reports a study of 6 children (ages 31-35 months) with specific language impairments. Subjects produced a greater frequency and diversity of multiword utterances in a free-play sampling situation than in a joint action routine sampling situation. (JDD)