Special problems faced by children who are hard of hearing and their families are discussed, with emphasis on problems of delayed identification and resulting delayed language development. Results of the 1996 Gallaudet National Parent Survey are reported. These indicate that deaf children are being identified earlier but hard of hearing children…

Addresses the questions: How does the interaction--primarily as talk--that occurs among children who read together extend their understanding of language and learning to read? Are there productive gains in their emerging literacy skills because of the talk that occurs as children pore over books together? Concludes that children's interactions…

This study compared verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in 40 children (ages 10-49 months) with Down Syndrome (DS) and 40 normally developing children (ages 8-17 months). DS children showed a dissociation between verbal comprehension and production but synchronous development between vocal lexical comprehension and…

Two experiments examined the sensitivity of children (ages 3 to 5) with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children to grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs. Findings indicated that the children with SLI were sensitive to grammatical morphemes, and that comprehension failure may reflect short-term…

This study examined whether maternal responsivity would predict the extent to which prelinguistic milieu teaching (PMT) facilitated generalized intentional communication better than a contrast small-group treatment with 58 children (ages 17 to 36 months) with developmental disabilities. If mothers were relatively responsive before treatment, PMT…

This study compared the language skills of low-birth-weight premature infants (N=11), higher birth-weight premature infants (N=14), and full-term infants (N=12) at 22 months corrected chronological age. Results suggest that low-birth-weight premature infants are at greater risk than higher birth-weight premature infants for speech and language…

Investigates whether inflectional morphology is rule-based or whether the assumption of pattern association is more adequate to account for the facts, arguing for the latter based on analysis of acquisitional data. Review of earlier literature on the subject examines experiments with German- and English-speaking children and supports the schema…

Investigated the hierarchical organization of the semantic system in preschoolers with and without word-finding deficits. Children named a series of objects at multiple levels of the noun hierarchy in response to contrast questions. Children with word-finding deficits had similar abilities to the other children but did not have enough stored…

Three hundred Beijing students in kindergarten through second grade were given the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts Revised (BTBC-R) to determine whether lexical diversity and morphological complexity affect the rate of acquisition of languages and whether conceptual factors interact with linguistic differences in development of relational concepts.…

This study used longitudinal productivity criteria to establish the phonetic skill of 20 children (followed from 9 to 16 months). The number of specific consonants produced consistently across the months predicted referential lexical use at 16 months. Prior use of at least two supraglottal consonants characterized the children achieving…

A study found 36 children (ages 3-5) with specific language impairment (SLI) produced more errors with third person singular pronouns than did age-level peers, but did not make more errors than peers matched for mean length of utterance. Error patterns were similar in children with SLI and their language-level peers. (Contains references.)…

Fifty-eight prelinguistic children with developmental disabilities and their mothers participated in an experimental test of whether intentional communication elicits maternal responses purported to facilitate language development. Results indicated that treatment effects on maternal responses varied by pre-treatment maternal education level and…

Investigated the interface of form and function in the acquisition of negation in Cantonese-speaking children. Data--from the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus--were longitudinal spontaneous samples of eight children aged 1.5 to 3.8 years. Main issues in the study were the sequence of emergence of negative markers and the acquisition of 11…

This article discusses current developments in connectionist modeling and the extension of principles of dynamical systems theory to cognitive and language development that have resulted in a new theory of language development known as emergentism. Specific language impairment is discussed within this emergentist view and preliminary implications…

Investigates the internalization process of reading among 32 first graders. Finds that more of the experimental group students (who were allowed to "mumble read" during instructional and silent reading time) were reading silently as well as having higher reading placements than the control group (whose vocalizations were suppressed). (RS)