Forty hearing-impaired adults read and retold short stories, in either English or American Sign Language (ASL). Analysis indicated that there was more explicitness in ASL, with more importance placed on specification of instruments involved in an action. No significant story differences were found between subjects' stories and stories of…

The communicative abilities of six sets of same-sex, preschool dizygotic twins were examined. In each dyad, one sibling had a strong history of recurrent otitis media (ROM) but the other twin did not. History of ROM was associated with lowered receptive vocabulary, with no consistent effects detected in expressive speech and language tasks.…

Selected discourse behaviors of 10 elementary school children with specific language impairment (SLI) presenting expressive or combined expressive-receptive deficits were compared to each other and to two groups of controls. The two SLI subgroups varied from each other on specific measures of turn taking and cohesion. Research implications are…

Thirty-two subjects (5 Broca's, 7 conduction, and 10 anomic aphasics and 10 normal controls) performed story retell and procedural discourse tasks containing familiar and unfamiliar topics, with familiar and unfamiliar listeners. Results indicated that topic familiarity significantly influenced verbal output in both normal and aphasic subjects.…

The effectiveness of two language treatment methods, modeling versus modeling plus evoked production, in promoting productive vocabulary in three late-talking toddlers was compared. Two subjects differed as to which particular treatment method was associated with better performance. Neither treatment method was effective for the third subject.…

This study attempted to quantify diagnostic characteristics related to consonant production of developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD) in 11 Dutch children (ages 6 and 7). The study was able to quantify diagnostic characteristics but found very few qualitative differences in error patterns between children with DVD and 11 age-matched children with…

Discusses the assessment of children's early language comprehension by the use of (1) parent reports; (2) preferential-looking models; and (3) event-related brain potentials. Examines recent findings on dissociations between language comprehension and production in normal, late-talking, and brain-injured children and considers the implications of…

This study reports data on form classes (e.g., nouns, verbs, modifiers) of the early vocabulary of an English-speaking boy with autism, to determine whether his language acquisition was referential or expressive. Results are compared with norms for normal and Down's syndrome populations. The predominance of nominals suggests a referential language…

This study found that use of a simultaneous prompting procedure was effective in training expressive object identification to three preschool students with developmental delays. The acquired identifications were maintained up to three weeks and generalized across persons and materials at high rates. (Author/JDD)

This article begins with an overview of the literature that establishes the value of sayings in foreign language teaching. It is argued that authors of textbooks should use sayings because they make up such an important part of a language. The most common sayings that should be found in any textbook are listed. (LET)

This study seeks to provide an introduction to some linguistic features of adolescent-therapist conversation, focusing on characteristics of adolescent speech that may appear during therapy. These include problems of expressing feelings, therapy talk as schoolroom talk, powerful forms of questioning, adolescent narrative, and lying. (26…

This study examined the effect of emotional content on the verbal pragmatic aspects of discourse production in right-brain-damaged (RBD), left-brain-damaged (LBD), and normal control adults. In the nonemotional conditions, LBDs were particularly impaired in pragmatics, whereas in the emotional condition, RBDs demonstrated pragmatic deficits.…

Grammatical development was examined for 10 children (ages 19 to 31 months) with expressive language impairments only and 10 children with both receptive- and expressive-language impairments. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax. However, specific weakness in verb-phrase elaboration…

This study compared the spontaneous oral narratives of 10 underachieving and 10 achieving gifted eighth graders. Results found significant differences across the dimensions of story length, episodic integrity, story grammar, and sentence complexity between the two groups, suggesting the presence of narrative language problems in underachieving…

Language characteristics of 11 children (ages 6-8) with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 11 typically developing children were compared for semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language skills. Findings indicated no differences on receptive vocabulary, but children with ADHD performed worse on tests of expressive speech and…