A review of research on early receptive language development of normal and language-handicapped children uses a functional-analysis perspective to emphasize how developmental changes are effected through the interactions of children with their environments. Lexical acquisition and early morphological/syntactic acquisition are addressed. (Author/CL)

Although 12 preadolescents who had been diagnosed as language impaired during preschool performed as well as a control group on certain tests involving literal aspects of language and on a nonverbal intelligence test, they were deficient in understanding metaphoric sentences and in performing the cognitive task. (Author/CL)

Revised methods of scoring the Token Test and Reporter's Test were developed to accommodate specific types of errors committed by language-disordered children during a previous standardization study. Test modifications are explained as are the results of administering the revised tests to both normal and language-disordered school-aged children.…

The study with 10 agrammatic aphasic (Broca) adults examined their difficulties using determiners in sentence comprehension. Results included the findings that printed rather than spoken presentation yielded significant improvement for the proper noun/common noun distinction, and that performance was poorer for the mass noun/count noun…

Six autistic children and seven children with relatively specific language impairment were asked to act out a series of sentences. Both groups made little use of a semantically based probable event strategy but were more likely to use a syntactically based word order strategy, similar to normals matched for receptive language age. (Author/DB)

Comparison of the fast mapping skills of language-impaired four- and five-year-olds (N=11) and nondisabled peers (N=11) revealed no differences in ability to infer a connection between a novel word and referent, to comprehend a novel word after a single exposure, and to recall nonlinguistic information associated with the referent. (Author/CB)

Language disabled (LD) and average (N=40) six- and eight-year-olds were evaluated on the ability to detect multiple word meanings in ambiguous sentences with and without picture clues and to identify appropriate word meaning by sentence context. LD students did not show average growth in these abilities over the two-year age span. (Author/DB)

Eighteen language disabled kindergarteners participated in a five-month intervention program emphasizing the development of expressive grammar. Ss made significant gains in expressive syntax, receptive morphology, expressive language, and one aspect of receptive language. Control Ss only made significant gains in one aspect of receptive language.…

The Test of Language Development was administered to a purposive sample of early elementary learning disabled students in an effort to analyze their language performance. Statistically significant differences were indexed between receptive and expressive language skills for this sample. (Author)

Intended for the teacher of handicapped children, the article describes some symptoms of language processing difficulty. Prerequisite skills for language comprehension are reviewed, and characteristics which can help to identify children with receptive language problems are listed. (SBH)

Children with language learning problems (N=151) and normally learning children (N=143) were tested on fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks that required responding to small acoustic differences. Performance on the auditory tasks was highly correlated with group placement suggesting that fine-grained auditory discrimination makes a major…

Twenty-one apparently normal children (ages 18 to 34 months) with slow expressive language acquisition were evaluated initially and again at age 3. The late talkers also scored significantly lower in receptive communication and socialization. Followup showed nearly half the group remained delayed in expressive communication and socialization,…