The paper reviews research on the pragmatic language skills of language impaired and learning disabled students. Discourse skills are analyzed in terms of communicative intentions, presupposition, social organization of discourse, and context. Narrative skills are examined according to narrative structure, scripts, text cohesion, and audience…

The author asserts that superintendent's leadership behavior, more than any other factor, determines the character and quality of the instructional programs provided for learning and language disabled students. (Author)

Lauretta Bender's experiences as a bright child struggling with specific learning problems and her subsequent work in language disorders are described. Her recognition of the biological nature of a group of learning disorders for which there was no clinical evidence of structural damage to the central nervous system is emphasized. (JDD)

The booklet presents guidelines for program development which resulted from Project CHILD, a research effort to validate identification, intervention, and teacher education programs for use with language handicapped children. School districts engaged in developing and implementing a language disability program are encouraged to consider the…

Twenty-four language-disordered children (ages 3-8 years) were trained, through modeling with a problem-solving set, to produce a question form involving a "wh" word--"who", "what", or "where"--in a structure requiring either auxiliary "is" or auxiliary "does." (Author)

The ability of 10 language learning disabled (LD) children (age 9-12) and 10 sex/age matched normals to judge correctness of linguistic stress and semantic appropriateness was examined. Results indicated more difficulty on the linguistic stress task than the semantic interpretation task for LD children and better performance by normals on both…

The study examined the relationship between the accuracy of repetition of syntactic structures and phonological sequences by language disordered children, and examined the effect of meaning on the phonological sequence repetition accuracy of a group of language disordered and normal speaking children. (Author)

Families of language-impaired children (N=76 and mean age 9 years) reported higher rates of first degree relatives with childhood language and/or learning disabilities than did families of matched controls. (Author/DB)

Twenty-nine learning disabled (LD) students in grades 1-4 were compared with non-LD students on comprehension of relative clauses. Ss were given baseline, 2-way, and 3-way reversible sentences to test comprehension and examine strategy differences. Results showed that LD students performed more poorly than non-LD students for all sentence types at…

This series of nine articles on dyslexia, or specific language disability, originally appeared in the Baltimore "Evening Sun" in response to increasing public interest regarding reading disabilities and handicaps. These articles summarize the methods of identifying and teaching these children and discuss the school's common failure to identify and…

Children's ability to recall information and draw inferences from orally presented narratives was examined in sixteen nine- to ten-year-old language/learning (LLD) disabled children and two groups of normally developing children. The LLD children did not differ significantly from the younger aged control group. (Author/DB)