Four language disordered children (3 to 4-years-old) were taught such subject properties as agreement morphemes, nominative case, and question inversion by learning first subject function and then subject properties, suggesting that functional theory of language has diagnostic and treatment implications for language disordered children. (Author/DB)

Four language disordered children (4 to 9 years old) were presented with a four-step program designed to achieve generalization of target grammatical rules to spontaneous discourse. Trained target rules increased in frequency while untrained rules did not. (Author)

The article looks at syntactic deficiencies involving simple clause structures and grammatical morphology in young children. A framework for understanding the development of simple clause structures is presented followed by a discussion of the correlates of early syntactic development. Procedures to assess and remediate syntactic deficiencies are…

The study investigated the relationship among the grammatical distinctions produced by three language-delayed or language-disordered children on the expressive part of the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test, the Carrow Elicited Language Inventory, and the Menyuk Sentences and those generated in a spontaneous language sample. (PHR)

A procedure called "contrast training" is described as a method to overcome the generalization problem by contrasting sentences so that young language handicapped learners can learn to recognize which parts of a sentence occur regardless of the presence or absence of the target form. (Author/SW)

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.…

This book presents a clinical procedure for presenting grammatical structure to children with language learning problems. The procedure is based on the developmental aspects of normal language learning and the natural, conversational setting in which children generally learn grammatical structure. Section 1 discusses the interactive language…

The authors describe the development and role of story grammars and note the implications for assessment of story production and retelling, scrambled stories, and the macrocloze technique (testing the child's ability to predict or infer missing information). Remediation procedures for improving prediction skills and training story grammar…

Attempts to demonstrate that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children can be viewed as normal learners faced with systematically altered input. By assuming SLI children are limited in their ability to perceive and hypothesize grammatical morphemes that are low in phonetic substance, many features of SLI children's language can be explained by…

This study, with 30 language learning-disabled, reading-disabled, and normal primary school children, found that clause structure complexity, fluency, and grammatical and phonemic accuracy tended to be highest when children were discussing absent referents, providing explanations and stories, and giving unshared information. These effects were…

The article examines the child's ability to produce complex sentences with sections on a structural framework for complex language (clausal and nonclausal complexity), a developmental perspective (coordination of clauses, subordination of nominal, adverbial, and relative clauses), and applied considerations (evaluating and teaching complex…

The study summarized in this paper deals with the grammatical analysis of the spontaneous speech of approximately 150 children who are classified as mentally disabled; educable (I.Q. range 50-80). The performance of these mentally disadvantaged children is compared with the performance of 200 normally developing children by using a clinical…

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking children were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary. The finding that the German-speaking children earned higher scores than did the English-speaking children adds to the literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular…

The study found that eight specifically language-impaired children (ages four and five) were more limited than eight normally developing children (ages two and three, matched for mean utterance length) in the use of both subject case marking and verb morphology. A relationship between the two types of usage was found in both groups of children.…