Past studies of autistic children's memory for linguistic materials have shown that autistics have a special linguistic coding difficulty. Because the autistic deficit stems from a failure to use semantic and syntactic knowledge or from a failure to acquire such forms, future research should explore the mechanics underlying this deficit. (PJM)

Comprehension and strategy use of 18 autistic children was compared with that of normal 3- and 4-year olds. Subjects were asked to act out certain syntactic and semantic patterns in two experiments. Autistic children performed below the levels of the normal subjects, suggesting that autism is a semantic/cognitive deficit. (PJM)

A study compared learning disabled (LD) adolescents with oral expressive problems to non-learning-disabled (NLD) adolescents on a formal operations task, with emphasis on a comparison between non-verbal performance and verbal explanations of the task. This paper reports part of the study, a comparison of two high school freshman subjects. The task…

Proposes a theoretical information-processing-based neuropsychological model of writing and oral spelling which contains linguistic and motor components and which helps explain agraphia independently of other language disorders. Disruption of the phonological system is thought to cause phonological agraphia. Disruption of the lexical system is…

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)

Discusses research in semantic processing and narrative discourse by psycholinguists, applied linguists, and speech pathologists. Focuses on children's comprehension of the language of instruction and contrasts normal and disordered comprehension and performance. Presents excerpts from two language evaluations that utilize some recent approaches…

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…

That semantics interacts with syntax has been shown in psycholinguistic investigations of the processing of language by adults and of the acquisition of language by children. The few programs for language assessment and therapy that have attempted to incorporate semantic considerations have included some misunderstandings of the psycholinguistic…