Purpose: The intent of this study was to examine the longitudinal morpho-syntactic progression of children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) grouped according to Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) scores. Methods: Thirty-seven children separated into four clusters were assessed in their pre-kindergarten and Grade 1 years. Cluster 1 were children with…

By the age of three, typically developing children can draw conceptual distinctions between "kinds of individual" and "kinds of stuff" on the basis of syntactic structures. They differ from adults only in the extent to which syntactic knowledge can be over-ridden by semantic properties of the referent. However, the relative roles of syntax and…

Non-adjacent dependencies characterize numerous features of English syntax, including certain verb tense structures and subject-verb agreement. This study utilized an artificial language paradigm to examine the contribution of item variability to the learning of these types of dependencies. Adult subjects with and without language-based learning…

The study investigated 14 school-age deaf children's responses to a listener's indication of communication breakdown and examined whether responses were related to syntactic or semantic abilities and/or typical mode of communication. Most revisions involved changes in sentence constituents. The frequency of revisions, repetitions, and no responses…

Analysis of spontaneous language samples of eight children (4-11 years old) diagnosed with developmental verbal apraxia (motor speech disorder) revealed that at least some of the errors could not be attributed to motor speech and/or phonologic limitations but rather indicated concomitant syntactic disorders. (Author/CL)

Language sample analysis measures have long been promoted as exhibiting greater ecological validity than formal testing in the assessment of language disorder in children. In practice, their use is often restricted to preschool children, owing to lack of normative information, as well as criticisms of the validity of commonly used measures for the…

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

The article proposes a reeducation program for conduction aphasics with reproductive difficulties. Program characteristics include analysis and manipulation of visual stimuli (written words and syllables), suppression of the compensation effect of the spared lexical-semantic system; and progressive increase in length and complexity of phonological…

This case study describes an adolescent with multiple articulation errors. Comparison with previous studies found this individual demonstrated longer phrase durations and more variability than either normally articulating or speech-disordered and language-disordered children. Interaction between syntactic and articulatory performance was also…

The FG syndrome is characterized by unusual facies; sudden infant death; developmental delay; and abnormalities of the cardiac, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems. Serial evaluations of one case with isolated agenesis of the corpus callosum found consistent patterns over time in specific language impairments in syntactic and…

Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 controls participated in a study testing sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. Participants with L/LD performed significantly below the comparison group, suggesting that this skill is problematic…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

The present study is an investigation of complex sentence structures produced by school-age children in ordinary 100-utterance language samples. A total of 15 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 15 of their classmates with typical language (TL) were the participants. Each child's conversational sample was coded for several types…

The effects of phonetic context and linguistic complexity level on /s/ misarticulations were examined in nine normal children (mean age 6.8 years) who misarticulated the /s/ phoneme interdentally in all positions of words. (Author/SEW)