Adolescents and young adults (n=120) were assessed on their use and understanding of concordant and discordant adverbial conjuncts. Results demonstrated an increasing ability with age to use and understand these words in the written mode, with mastery in usage trailing understanding. Concordant and discordant conjuncts were equally difficult.…

Thirty-three children (5 to 7 years old) were presented with sentences such as "John hit Bill and then he hit Sam." It was found that when the pronoun was stressed the children performed better than when it was unstressed. (Author/SBH)

Twelve language disordered second graders scored significantly lower on inference items than the cognitively matched control group of second graders on verbal and picture tasks. There was no significant difference between language disordered and kindergarten Ss for either the overall or conditional analysis. Results were interpreted as indicative…

Eight adults with autistic disorders and eight IQ-matched, mentally retarded (MR) subjects were given a task involving the comprehension of structured and unstructured indirect requests. Although the performance of the MR subjects was better in both conditions, both groups performed similarly to normal four- to six-year-olds. (Author/CL)

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. The paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. (Author)

The measures of comprehension showed that four-fifths of the children scored lower than the 10th percentile for second-grade hearing children, and two-thirds scored at or below the 1st percentile. Evaluating production, 68 percent of the sentences produced by the children contained semantic, syntactic, or semantic-syntactic errors. (Author)

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

The effects of consonantal context on vowel lipreading were assessed for 30 adult males with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss who lipread videotape recordings of two female talkers. Results indicated that vowel intelligibility was significantly poorer in most contexts involving highly visible consonants. (Author/DB)

Although both 14 language impaired and 14 normal young children showed greater comprehension and production of words referring to objects than to actions, this tendency was not as marked for the language impaired Ss. (CL)

Amount recalled did not differ between the hearing and deaf groups on the normal story, but the deaf children were superior in amount recalled for both confused stories. However, the deaf children made significantly more distortions in their recall than did the hearing children. (Author)

The study investigated preferences shown by 25 preschool children regarding the handier toy, the smaller toy, the more probable toy, the animate noun, and the first-mentioned noun as agent in interpreting semantically reversible sentences prior to adult performance. (Author/SBH)

Effects on spatial term comprehension in 200 6- to 11-year-old children as the result of transformations in the stimulus dimensions of six pictures containing the same three figures were explored using J. Piaget's concept of spatial perspective. (Author)

This preliminary study examined effects of word visibility and prime association factors on visual spoken word recognition in lipreading, using a related/unrelated prime-target paradigm with 20 hearing adults. In related prime-target pairings, more targets with a high than low prime association were identified. In unrelated prime-target pairings,…

The study with 30 five-year-olds and 30 seven-year-olds demonstrated that children as young as five have an emerging ability to solve both verbal and perceptual proportional analogy problems and to detect the meaning of proportional metaphoric sentences. (Author/DB)

Two studies examined the ability to assign thematic roles and to coindex referentially dependent noun phrases in closed head injured adults (N=20), adult stroke patients (N=20), and normal adults (N=20). Results suggested that syntactic comprehension disturbances are similar following left cerebral hemisphere infarction and closed head injury.…