Compares a group of 32 toddlers with employed mothers with a matched group of 38 toddlers with nonemployed mothers in order to examine the effect of maternal employment on the development of the child. While no differences were found between the two groups in language development and emotional adjustment, children of employed mothers were more…

A Parent Assistance Plan (PAP) was designed to teach parents to work on their children's language at home. Of four matched groups of nursery children, one received PAP, one PAP plus Distar language at school, one Distar only, and one no treatment. PAP groups showed significantly greater language development. (Author/SJL)

Illustrates how a particular setting affects language use and offers suggestions for parents to help children develop language sensitivity. (HTH)

Language comprehension performance on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language (TACL) was investigated using three modes of test administration with 24 four-year-old children representing various categories of cognitive tempo. Results indicated that all Ss had similar expressive language abilities. (Author/SB)

Presents study of Japanese- and German-speaking children who were tested on the Sentence Comprehension Test to investigate understanding of various English grammatical structures. Concludes that learning of English as a second language in a natural milieu seems to pass through stages similar to those exhibited by monolingual English children.…

Total scores on the screening test from the Test of Syntactic Abilities for 382 hearing impaired persons (8 to 19 years old) were significantly related to hearing threshold level, number of multiple handicaps, age, educational setting, method of communication, and hearing and usage. (Author)

Subjects ranging in age from 7 to 12 years selected correct story completion alternatives significantly more often when these alternatives were similes than when they were semantically equivalent metaphors, and when alternatives specifically denoted the referent of the metaphorical comparison than when the identity of the referent had to be…

Three linguistic theories (the creolist, the transformationalist, and the ethnolinguistic) of the origin and historical development of Ebonics in America are examined. (Author/MC)

Reports research on the communicative behavior of a hearing child whose parents communicated with him, from birth, in both signs and words. The child's expressive ability accelerated in both modalities and this is possibly attributable to the addition of the signed component. (PJM)

Elaborates on cognitive/academic language proficiency and basic interpersonal communicative skills. Discusses assumptions regarding bilingual program exit and entry fallacies and implications for U.S. bilingual education. Argues that failure to adequately conceptualize the construes of language proficiency and its cross-language dimensions causes…

Presents two models of language acquisition: one postulating articulatory learning of underlying adult forms and the other both articulatory and perceptual learning. Reanalyzes the first model's data and concludes that two types of phonological rules are recognizable: perceptual-encoding rules and output (articulatory) rules. Identifies properties…

Looks at the shortcomings of the Arabic writing system and reviews some suggestions for changing it. (JT)

The author describes two approaches to the development of talk in early childhood--behavioristic, which provides instruction in specific skills of grammar and vocabulary, and the approach which encourages the development of meaning rather than refining the structure of speech. (KC)

Offers suggestions that are more visually oriented than verbally oriented for helping the hearing impaired student (MKM)

To better understand the mechanisms underlying encoding, manual signs and spoken words were presented in a short term memory task to six severely retarded children (11 to 14 years old). It was found that manual signs were encoded differently from spoken words for short term memory storage. (Author/PHR)