A study of individual patterns of usual and unusual phonological process occurrence in nine phonologically disordered children revealed that a small, basic subset of phonological processes accounted for the majority of errors made, with frequency the distinguishing characteristic among individuals. Unusual processes were primarily changes in word…

A speech/language remediation-intervention model is proposed to enhance processing of auditory information in students with language or learning disabilities. Such children have difficulty attending to language signals (verbal and nonverbal responses ranging from facial expressions and gestures to those requiring the generation of complex…

Summarizes role of language deficiencies in reading disability, focusing on two areas that appear critical to reading skill: language processing abilities and the awareness of phonological structure. Shows distinguishing characteristics of disabled readers to be consistent with theoretical and experimental findings about skilled reading, and to…

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…

Discusses the language development in individuals with Down's syndrome in both early childhood and adulthood, and outlines intervention programs to assist language development in these individuals not only in their early years but throughout their lives. (71 references) (CFM)

The order of acquisition of a set of linguistic structures and the relationship between structures were examined over 5 years in 28 language-impaired children (age 4) and 32 language-matched normal children. Results demonstrated a marked similarity between groups, suggesting that the linguistic impairments may be principally processing, not…

This book is intended for graduate students and practitioners serving the needs of individuals with language-related learning disabilities in regular education, special education, and speech-language pathology. Some chapters are contributed by other authors. An introductory chapter chronicles historical trends in understanding and addressing…

Motivational factors and unique characteristics of sign language systems are suggested as contributing to the ability of severely dysfunctional nonverbal children to make progress within a manual communication medium. (Author/EJS)

This article takes a functional approach to relationships between make-believe play and language development. It is argued that play and early literacy share similarities of function and social context, and therefore both prepare children for similar symbol-using processes. Transformation from oral language to literacy and implications for…

This research is testing the suggestion that acquisition and representation of formal language knowledge of dysphasic children is qualitatively different from the normal language acquisition/representation processes. In a cohort-sequential design, aspects of language and cognitive development of 120 dysphasic children aged 6-14 are being analyzed…

Thirteen subjects (aged 5:6 to 6:6) with language disorders were given elicited imitation and spontaneous language tasks, and their performance was compared among and within subjects. The two procedures produced significantly correlated results for some children but not for others. Analysis of specific syntactic forms also produced variable…

Comparison of language-impaired two- to three-year-olds (N=10) and normal one-year-olds (N=15) matched for expressive language revealed that the language-impaired subjects acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children, although language-impaired subjects' extensions of the names to new…

Concludes that an integrated language-reading treatment approach was effective in improving the reading performance of second-grade children with possible listening comprehension problems and language deficiencies. (FL)

A study was conducted to test the utility of a protocol, consisting of 30 pragmatic parameters of language, to evaluate conversational speech from 157 subjects in six diagnostic groups. Four distinct profiles emerged separating the diagnostic groups within which differences in the distribution of pragmatic deficits were identified. (Author/KM)

This investigation studied the performance of fifteen normal and fifteen language-disabled children on experimental pragmatic tasks and on a standardized Piagetian measure of sensorimotor intelligence. The children were matched for mean length of utterance, all subjects performing at the holophrastic level. A series of experimental measures was…