Purpose: Although conversational recasting has been a generally successful treatment approach, the precise factors that influence children's learning through recasts are not yet understood. In this study, we examined details of the relationship between child utterance and clinician utterance that seemed likely to influence learning. Method: Three…

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in three, four, five, and six year olds to examine bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The judgments of the six year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children.…

In studies involving 12 and 16 mentally retarded preschoolers, retarded children's lexical usage was examined as a function of informativeness. (Author/CL)

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.…