The syntactic proficiency of 67 learning disabled children was evaluated during a task requiring them to convey information to a listener. Learning disabled children in all grades were found to produce shorter mean main clauses than nondisabled children even on this relatively simple communicative task. (Author/SEW)

Results of two studies with 45 normal three- to five-year-old children indicated that, when the Ss initiated actions with verbal instruction, their use of conjunctions and clause ordering was more effective than in other initiated contexts without a verbal model. (Author/MC)

Results of two studies with 60 children aged three, five, and seven, and 40 children aged four through 6.8, indicated that use and understanding of politeness at age three years seemed related to emerging ability to understand the perspective of another, and at later ages, to knowledge of social roles. (Author/MC)

The authors describe a developmental approach for teaching expressive writing skills to learning disabled adolescents. General guidelines for remediation are outlined, and activities useful in a developmental writing approach are listed. (SW)

Microcomputers can serve as expressive communication tools for severely physically disabled persons. Features such as single input devices, direct selection aids, and speech synthesis capabilities can be extremely useful. The trend toward portable battery-operated computers will make the technology even more accessible. (CL)

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

Relative contributions of form and function information to concepts of 10 objects were investigated with first, second, and third-grade subjects. For first graders, function information about objects took precedence. For second and third graders, form information took precedence. (Author/GSK)

Details typical charges against expressivist rhetorics, while sketching a version of expressivism underwritten by the principles and procedures of ordinary language philosophy. Suggests that the teaching and learning practices that emerge from this analysis compete with the vague, sometimes grandiose ambitions of expressivist practitioners as they…

Noncomprehension signaling by 16 school-age children with mild mental retardation was compared with performance of 16 typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age. Message type and speaker were manipulated in a direction-following task. Message type, not speaker, influenced noncomprehension signaling, with no intergroup…

Performance of 32 children with language impairment and 22 without, on perception and imitation of synthesized syllables, found that phoneme perception ability of children with only expressive impairment fell between that of controls and expressive-receptive impaired children. Both groups of subjects had difficulty with phonological memory, but…

Discusses how the child, the classroom teacher, and the language specialist can work together in the context of the classroom to help children with significant identified expressive language difficulties. Discusses developing metacommunicative awareness in whole-class lessons, small group discussions, and individual conferences. (SR)

Sixteen students (ages 11-17) with profound hearing impairment, assessed as having either good or poor speech intelligibility, were asked to describe pictures and to respond to a series of clarification requests. Significant differences emerged in repair strategies used by the two groups and in comparison with normal hearing peers despite similar…

Describes a follow-up study of 25 boys who had been diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Delay (SELD) at 24 to 30 months of age. At three to four years, half of the boys continued to exhibit poor expressive language skills, suggesting that young children diagnosed with SELD are at considerable risk for continuing language problems. (33…

Story retelling in which the child retells a story he has read has been used to effectively assess and improve reading comprehension, knowledge of story schema, and communication skills in elementary students with hearing impairments at the Kendall Demonstration Elementary School in Washington, D.C. (DB)

An analysis of syntactic complexity was performed on spontaneously generated oral stories obtained from 93 learning disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students at age levels from 8 through 13 years. Results indicated almost identical rates of correct usage and similar patterns of usage between LD and NA subjects on all measures. (Author/DB)