Reviews textbook which focuses on disorders of language processing that can be viewed as generated by specific language impairments (SLI). Highlights the book's examination of root causes which may contribute to developmental language disorders for all components of language processing, as well as the interaction between the disorders. Finds the…

Gives examples of the potential for language development within practical science activities at the elementary school level. Contains 12 references. (WRM)

Examines the contribution of storytelling to the education of young children, and reviews theoretical frameworks used to contextualize storytelling in formal education. Presents five major types of contributions of storytelling: to other language and expressive arts, to the inner world of affect, to autobiography, to narrative, and to certain…

A case history of a female literacy student examined how journal writing about her literacy experiences increased her metacognitive self-knowledge, reading comprehension, writing performance, and self-esteem. With one-to-one tutorial guidance, she learned to assess her literacy learning from her own perspective. (SK)

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

A study of 70 children found that hearing levels at 12-18 months were significantly associated with speech delay and low language outcomes at 3 years of age. Significant and substantial effects of hearing levels at 12-18 months on speech status at 3 years were significantly mediated by language status at 3 years. (Contains extensive references.)…

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Examined the relationship between language and cognitive development and emotional-behavioral problems (measured concurrently and at a 5- and 17-month follow-up) in 680 nonreferred 4-year-olds from financially-disadvantaged families. Found that language delays were significantly related to emotional-behavioral problems. When cognitive differences…

Argues that functional categories instantiated in the learners' first language (L1) transfer to the initial state of second language syntactic development. On the basis of Zulu interlanguage data on acquisition of the obligatory declarative complementizer "ukuthi" (that) by English native speakers, argues that Comp contains a null…

Examined word retrieval in 14- to 24-month-olds. Found that children with limited productive vocabularies were less likely to produce labels of hidden objects than children with larger vocabularies, even though all could name them and did well when asked to find them. Pictorial cues facilitated word retrieval. Naming errors peaked among children…

Addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy between the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar framework, evidence on German/English and Latvian/English is presented from the earliest stages of language development. (Author/VWL)

Investigates how and what properties of abstract lexical entries in the mental lexicon interact with the distribution of surface morphemes in language contact or first language attrition. Data from Hungarian/English bilingual children provide evidence that asymmetries in the production of Hungarian preverbs and case suffixes may be explained by…

Evaluates the claim of uniform size and shape restrictions in prosodic development using a cross-sectional database of English-speaking children's multisyllabic word productions. Suggests children's increasing faithfulness to unstressed syllables can be explained by different constraint rankings that relate to edge alignment, syllable structure,…

A study involving 21 toddlers with hearing impairments and 21 typical toddlers and their mothers found that child emotional availability made significant positive predictors of language gain. Maternal emotional availability, however, made significantly greater positive predictors of child language gain for children with hearing impairments than…

Explores the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. Analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three children and their parents suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents' speech to children and that children…