Informal language sampling is ubiquitous in the study of developing grammatical abilities in children with and without delayed language, including study of grammatical abilities in the area of finite verb production. Finite verbs are particularly important to assess as they appear to be the grammatical morphemes most vulnerable to error in the…

Purpose: Obtaining information on both languages of English language learners for assessment can be a challenge in a multilingual context. It is often difficult or impossible to observe a child's first language directly due to the absence of resources available in every language spoken. The objectives of this study were (1) to develop a parent…

Floating-Harbor syndrome is a rare congenital disorder characterized by specific facial features, short stature associated with significantly delayed bone age and language impairment. Although language delay is a cardinal manifestation of this syndrome, few reports describe the specific language difficulties of these patients, particularly the…

Topic continuing and nontopic continuing utterances produced by three productively language-disordered preschoolers were analyzed. Results suggested that Ss produced a proportion of adjacent utterances comparable to proportions previously reported for children with normal production language skills and that they relied on an imitation strategy to…

Three children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) identified syllables in words, judged intrasyllabic sound positions, and constructed syllable shapes within monosyllabic frames. Results suggest that DAS children demonstrate an apparent breakdown in the ability to perceive "syllableness" and to access and compare syllable…

Evaluation monthly over a seven-month period of 11 kindergarten children who misarticulated /s/ found that one factor associated with /s/ acquisition was the presence of adjacent palatal-fricative/affricate sounds. A score of 38 percent correct /s/ responses or better in two consecutive test periods predicted good progress in /s/ acquisition.…

Structural and functional features of productive language of 15 healthy and 30 at-risk two-year-olds were compared. Although premature and physically handicapped toddlers did not differ significantly from each other, both groups were delayed in a variety of structural indices of productive language. On functional features of language usage,…

The judgment of vocal affect was studied in 19 language delayed children and 19 children with normal language. The children identified utterances spoken in an angry, happy, or sad tone of voice. The language delayed children made significantly fewer correct judgments. (Author/SEW)

This article describes development and use of a novel, script-based stimulability task for toddlers. The task assesses stimulability for fricatives, affricates, and liquids in isolation and single words. Three levels of cuing are provided to elicit desired sounds/words. Use of the task with 10 toddlers having normal speech-language development and…

Vocal samples were collected from a child with cri du chat syndrome from the age of 8 to 26 months. Analyses indicated that the high vocal fundamental was characteristic of comfort state vocalizations of the child. There was a predominance of falling intonation contours and limited interutterance variation of fundamental frequency, and phonetic…

This study compared phonological patterns in the speech of 25 children prenatally exposed to cocaine and multiple drugs and with 25 non-exposed children (all children ages 22 to 51 months). Prenatal exposure to drugs was associated with an increase in the use of phonological processes. Results suggest that these children's speech development is…

The linguistic home environments of 10 language-delayed children and 10 linguistically normal children were compared using audiorecordings of parent-child dyads. Significant differences were found between the linguistic interactions of parents with a language-disordered child and parents with a linguistically normal child in all areas studied.…

The receptive and expressive "wh" interrogative performance of 20 language-delayed children (4.3 to 6.4 years old) was compared to available normative data. These findings suggest that the delayed children develop the same order of acquisition and rules for questioning as normal children, but at a slower rate. (Author/SEW)

This study examined bias in intelligibility judgments based on judges' personal familiarity with subjects. Four speech-delayed children (ages four and seven) were audiotaped at intervals during therapy, and intelligibility was assessed by their parents and unfamiliar adults. Mothers were significantly better at identifying words being spoken. An…

Evaluation of the speech of five Dutch-speaking adolescent girls with Down's syndrome found that speech errors tended to be identical to the error patterns in young normal children supporting the view that misarticulations in Down's syndrome subjects are mainly the result of a delay in speech development. (Author/DB)