Results of a comparative study of speech-like vocalizations of a deaf infant and 11 hearing infants indicated that from eight to 13 months, the deaf subject differed strikingly from hearing infants of comparable age. The topography of the deaf infant's vocalizations resembled that of four- to six-month-old hearing infants. (Author/CL)

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…

Analysis of spontaneous language samples of six children (two to four years old) at three linguistic ages (defined by mean length of utterance in morphemes) replicated the proposed semantic ordering of question types. However, a stage characterized by uninverted forms was not supported. (CL)

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)

The influence of referent type (Objects vs. Actions) and within-category referent relationships (functionally similar vs. perceptually similar) upon acquisition of lexical concepts by 12 infants were examined. Ss acquired object words and concepts in greater numbers than action words and concepts, suggestive of differences in the underlying…

No significant differences were found between the children's use of prelinguistic gestures or patterns of play. Significant differences were found, however, between the communicative environments of the two groups. Severely handicapped Ss experienced significantly fewer opportunities to hear labels for objects of their attention or observe…

Compared to language-matched normal Ss, 15 language-impaired children were advanced in the level and direction of their symbolic play. However, compared to age norms, the language-impaired Ss evidenced deficits in symbolic play. (CL)

When the presuppositional and performative abilities of 18 language disordered and 18 normal preschoolers were compared, both groups showed a tendency to encode changing rather than unchanging situational elements and demonstrated similar levels of imperative and declarative performative intent. Performative and presuppositional behaviors were…

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

The study involving 35 normal preschoolers suggested that normal preschoolers appear to create faster mappings (rapid creating of lexical representations for unfamiliar words) containing a great deal of linguistic and nonlinguistic information on the basis of even brief, casual encounters with new words. (Author/CL)

The study investigated the stability of five type-token ratios (TTRs) in 50-utterance oral language samples of 83 children three, four, and five years of age. Based on the results of this study, TTR measures of the language of young children should not be compared for samples that differ in number of words. (Author/CL)

The study investigated the relationship of early language development and symbolic play behaviors in 20 normal and 20 trainable mentally retarded children. Symbolic play which involves the use of one object to represent another was found to be a strong correlate of early language development. (Author/CL)

Approximately 47,200 spontaneous utterances of four nonstuttering children were analyzed for the occurrence of developmental disfluency from the time of one word utterances through the emergence of beginning syntax. Variations were found among the children's profiles with systematic changes in disfluency at each succeeding mean length of utterance…

From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances, and differences in frequency of structures were examined. (Author)

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)