This study examined the language skills of 30 students (ages 9-16) with mild or moderate behavior disorders (BD). Results revealed that BD students fell a minimum of one standard deviation below the normative mean on all but one measure used. Further analysis indicated the students were having difficulty with both receptive and expressive…

Incidental teaching and traditional discrete-trial procedures were used to teach two children (ages 10 and 12) with autism the expressive use of two color adjectives. Results demonstrated that traditional discrete-trial teaching was more efficient and produced faster acquisition but incidental teaching resulted in greater generalization and equal…

Comparison of 32 children (ages 5-7) with specific language impairments (SLI) and normally developing children matched for either age or language development found that the SLI children, unlike either control group, performed significantly better for morpheme production tasks in an imitation instruction condition than in a modeling condition.…

Comparison of English past-tense productivity in 31 school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 31 children with no language (NL) impairment found SLI children made more errors, with a greater proportion resulting from overuse of unmarked grammatical forms (e.g., "go") than from suffixation (e.g., "goed"). Children with SLI…

A study compared family and professional assessment of the communication skills of 34 preschool males with Fragile X syndrome. Moderate agreement was found for expressive communication ratings, whereas agreement for receptive communication ratings was low to moderate. Parents rated their children significantly higher than did professionals for…

Discusses the results of research in which children with no preparatory musical training were asked to improvise short pieces of music to be interpreted as "self-descriptions." Views these improvisations as expressions of the self by assuming that they contain "metaphors" that in many respects are self-reflexive. (DSK)

Two studies compared the descriptions given by children (N=74) with and without autism of animated stimuli depicting mechanical launching effects, intentional reactions, or sequences of mechanical and intentional reactions. Although children with autism were as able as control groups at these differentiations, differences were found in their…

Four toddlers with Down syndrome (ages 10-30 months) were presented with six nonreactive and reactive toys for 90 sessions of free play. When the toys were nonreactive, the subjects vocalized to express their disappointment or to seek assistance from the adults in the room. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Contains an imaginary writing assignment and an imaginary student's response to it that critiques it and the conception of writing it appears to be predicated upon. (TB)

The effect of extended, continuous exposure to frequency-altered auditory feedback during an oral reading and monologue task on the stuttering frequency and speech rate of 12 adults was examined. A significant decrease in stuttering events and an increase in number of syllables produced was found for the oral reading task but not for the monologue…

This study compared language skills in a group of very low-income toddlers with those of a middle-income sample matched on age and sex. The assessment instrument used was the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for toddlers, a parent report form. Scores for low-income group were strikingly lower on three key indices evaluated: size of…

Fifteen children (grades 3-5) with specific language impairment (SLI) were asked to define 10 common nouns. Children with SLI scored significantly lower than children with typically developing language for both content and form. Results suggest that lexical access and/or lack of metalinguistic knowledge were potential causes for the lower scores…

Describes how 25 mothers across children's age groups (6 months olds through 4-year-olds) used prosody, specifically pitch and stress variations, while reading with their children. Finds that the mothers' intent was to guide children's understanding of the complexities of the story. Indicates that all the mothers used pitch and stress in…

Expressive vocabulary was studied in 130 children (ages 1 to 5 years) with Down syndrome. Although there was continuous growth in expressive referential vocabulary from birth through 5 years, age 5 was found to be an important developmental marker for multiword combinations and grammatical vocabulary. (Author/CR)

The validity of the Fundacion MacArthur Inventaria de Habilidades Communicativas: Palabras y Enuciados was examined with twenty 20- and nineteen 28-month-old, typically developing, monolingual, Spanish-speaking children in Mexico. Results indicated validity for assessing expressive vocabulary in 20-month-olds and expressive vocabulary and grammar…