Results show that comprehension of word types (nouns, verbs, etc.) and linguistic structure can be orderly, producing a hierarchy of complexity similar to that found in normally hearing children. However, performance was about three years behind that of normally hearing peers. Journal availability: Elsevier North Holland, Inc., 52 Vanderbilt…

Proposes that second language instruction should give priority to the receptive skills of listening and reading and describes a project conducted in Sweden which sought to realize the development of these skills in a short course. (AM)

A project designed to study the feasibility of utilizing the eight components of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf Communication Performance Profile for evaluating the receptive and expressive communication skills of deaf secondary level students was conducted on 420 students (ages 11 to 21) at two residential schools for the deaf.…

A six-year-old with a language problem responded consistently to 100 locative commands by putting objects in containers and on flat surfaces regardless of the preposition or order of the nouns in the commands. (Author/CL)

Investigates construct, predictive, and differential validity for the Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test (CREVT). Adequate construct validity for the CREVT was documented, using the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children-III as a criterion. Also, the CREVT effectively differentiated between students with disabilities. These…

The study demonstrated that 36 male children (ages 7-10) with learning problems were characterized not by a restricted vocabulary as such (i.e., the variance common to both receptive and productive vocabulary measures) but by a hampered production of words (i.e., the variance common to both speed-of-naming and productive vocabulary measures.…

Relational knowledge of 21 derivational suffixes was investigated with 120 children (grades 3-8) and 40 adults. Results obtained from a nonsense-word model indicated that suffixes were comprehended with greater accuracy than they were produced, particularly by the children. Children and adults demonstrated greatest accuracy in comprehension and…

Two groups of 10 adult aphasics received auditory-verbal "yes-no" questions, including egocentric, environmental, pictorial, and relationship items, either in a consistent order or random order. Support was found for the existence of a hierarchy of difficulty among the types of questions, but there was no significant difference between…

Four nine year olds with mild mental retardation received training on the meaning of idiomatic phrases. All children demonstrated learning and an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. (Author/JDD)

This study evaluated the relationship between the play behaviors of 18 deaf blind children (aged 3-12) and their communication skills using the Play Assessment Scale and several multidomain developmental checklists. Results revealed that behaviors observed during play assessment were highly related to ratings of receptive, expressive, and…

This study compared the science vocabulary performance of 76 students with learning disabilities (LD) and 78 normally achieving (NA) students at elementary and intermediate grade levels. Findings indicated significant differences in receptive language performance between LD and NA students and differences in expressive language between older and…

Twenty individuals (ages 8-18) with mental retardation and 20 controls matched for nonverbal mental age were assessed on receptive language level and nonverbal cognitive functioning. Results indicate that the nondisabled group placed less emphasis on the formal, sequential properties of language and more on semantic, conceptual properties.…

This study found that a group of 20 children (ages 6-12) with autism and a group of 20 children with developmental receptive language disorder both manifested a relative sequential processing deficit. The groups did not differ significantly on overall sequential and simultaneous processing capabilities relative to their degree of language…

This study investigated success in responding to naturalistic conversational questions by six young adults with autism, using a quantitative discourse analytic method. Four types of questions were identified: more than seven words in length; multiclausal; requiring inference; and indirect requests for information. The prediction that…