The study compared semantic relationships expressed in the word meanings of 56 profoundly hearing-impaired subjects divided into children older than and younger than 9 years. Although there were significant differences between the groups on the number of semantic relationships produced, the groups did not differ significantly on the types or…

Suggests activities for teaching elementary students about types of word-meaning changes. (JH)

Attention is given to spoken language as an important base for reading success, followed by a description of the oral language characteristics of school age children and a consideration of the match between these characteristics and the materials used to teach reading. (Author/JC)

Describes a tool for determining a student's level of language development through oral responses; indicates a positive correlation between achievement test scores and oral language production. (MAI)

Examines word families, words grouped together by common meaning, orthography, form, and spelling. Discusses ways to encourage children's language acquisition and understanding of how words work in specific contexts. (HTH)

The conventions inherent to language are explored, and demonstrations, engagement, and sensitivity are discussed as factors present in all learning situations in which a person learns to master these complex conventions. (HTH)

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…

One method of evaluating comprehension and language growth consists of analyzing the oral or written answers to questions about stories read to or by students and about visual representations. The method is applicable to various content areas at all levels of instruction. The T-unit or communication unit, the linguistic unit that cannot be further…

This study investigated the developmental nature of linguistic knowledge revealed in children's spelling. Five groups of children from middle to upper income families in grades 2, 4, 6, 9, and 12 were selected as subjects. It was assumed that linguistic resourcefulness changes as a result of formal schooling and that spelling errors would…

This study tested the hypothesis that the reported increase in children's use of prepositional phrases when exposed to novel (inverted) prepositional phrases could be eliminated by discrimination training in two prepositional forms. (Author/MS)

Fourteen children (ages 4-6) with specific language impairment produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names. Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace…

Speech samples of 14 normal 2-year-old children and 14 Down's Syndrome 5- to 12-year-old children were analyzed to investigate the structural complexity. Results from the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure indicated that even when matched with normal children for mean length of utterance, Down's Syndrome Ss produced less syntactically…

Trade-off effects among linguistic components were compared in 30 elementary school children with deficits in both oral and written language, deficits only in written language, or normal language development. Analysis of syntax, phonology, and fluency indicated group effects, with trade-offs between some linguistic measures and positive…

Traditionally, reading disabled children have been characterized as suffering a performance or process deficit that prevents them from acquiring the knowledge and skills underlying proficient reading and comprehension. Such explanations raise some logical problems. Process oriented theories do not adequately explain the specificity nor address the…