This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD…

This study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

In a previous study, Parisse suggested that subject dislocations in French language (e.g. "la fille "elle" dort") could be considered as a marker of morphosyntactic development in children with normal language development. The present study aimed to develop this proposition and to confirm it with experimental data, more…

The use of four types of psychological state words (physiological, emotional, desire, and cognitive) during mother-child play sessions at ages 3, 4, and 5 years was examined in 30 children diagnosed with delayed expressive language at 24-31 months and 15 age-matched comparison children with typical development. The children's mean length of…

Examines children's strategies in language production. Focuses on how children in early stages of language acquisition talk about objects, spatial relations, and actions, and the extent to which they rely on general purpose terms in all three domains. (JMB)

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

The knowledge of letter names measured just before children enter school has been known for a long time as one of the best longitudinal predictors of learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. After a period during which the comprehensive investigation of this relationship was largely disregarded, there is now a growing interest in attempts…

An examination of the use of metaphors by children summarizes the views of metaphor as found in the literature and describes a theoretical framework for the study of such utterances in young children by integrating two hypotheses. It is postulated that the young child uses metaphor to test new inferences about various kinds of relationships in the…

From a theoretical viewpoint, the results of the study support the importance of the receptive expressive distinction in considering behavior. The practical implications suggest the importance of assessing receptive functions more directly and support present large-scale remedial procedures for disadvantaged youth in terms of improving and…

Background: Children who have reached the age of 2 years without having acquired a 50-word vocabulary and/or who use no word combinations are referred to in the literature as "Late Talkers". Research has not yet identified the factors that cause slow development of expressive language; in particular, relatively little research has been carried out…

This book consists of five lectures on communication given at the fifth Nobel Conference. Leroy G. Augenstein explores the positive and negative consequences of man's increasing capacity to manipulate and control the human mind. Peter Marler demonstrates that all the elements necessary for a communication system to qualify as a language exist…

Sound play is important to child language development in that it contributes to the phonetic substrate, it is a factor in phonological development, and it is something to be learned as part of the socially acceptable use of language. Sound play progresses in three stages: (1) babbling, in which a gradual acquisition of phonetic units is built up…

Designed for the teacher in training as well as the classroom teacher, the text presents step-by-step remedial techniques for developmental training of the slow learner or the child with learning disabilities. Presented are activities, instructional materials, and teaching techniques for grades 1 through 8. Developmental areas included are…

This book provides a summary of past and cutting-edge research on the acquisition of language by young children. It lends support to the behavioralist paradigm of language acquisition, namely, that maternal rewards and corrections should be integrated with perceptual, cognitive, and social learning conceptualizations in a skill-learning approach…