A modified incidental-teaching procedure was used to increase the receptive language skills of two autistic youths with previous institutionalization. Percentage of correct, unprompted object identifications increased when the incidental-teaching package (gestural prompts, behavior-specific praise, and contingent access to lunch-making supplies)…

The article discusses acquisition of five aspects of English beyond the basic simple sentence (inflections and modulations of meaning, negation, passive sentences, coordination, and relative clauses) and considers implications for hearing impaired students. Ways in which syntax interacts with pragmatic and semantic factors are analyzed. (CL)

Research shows that native signers do better academically than Ss who use speechreading, written English, or manual forms of English. Instruction through a natural sign language is also a benefit, and the transition to teaching through English can be successfully accomplished at about the fifth-grade level. (Author)

No significant differences were found between the children's use of prelinguistic gestures or patterns of play. Significant differences were found, however, between the communicative environments of the two groups. Severely handicapped Ss experienced significantly fewer opportunities to hear labels for objects of their attention or observe…

The article outlines the parallel development of cognition and language and describes Piagetian-oriented assessment approaches. (CL)

Presents major characteristics of comtemporary views on oral and written language development. Critically reviews recent theoretical and research findings on language function and brain and concludes that very little information exists about the relationship between brain development and language development. (CMG)

The article reviews characteristics of autistic communication and offers a framework for understanding language and communication in autism. Noted are gestalt versus analytic modes of cognitive processing, language acquisition, and language use. (Author/CL)

Compared to language-matched normal Ss, 15 language-impaired children were advanced in the level and direction of their symbolic play. However, compared to age norms, the language-impaired Ss evidenced deficits in symbolic play. (CL)

Students learn language best when they are permitted to speak freely on their favorite subjects in an unstructural learning environment. If the teacher refrains from correcting grammatical errors, the students will not become inhibited in their speech. (CK)

When the presuppositional and performative abilities of 18 language disordered and 18 normal preschoolers were compared, both groups showed a tendency to encode changing rather than unchanging situational elements and demonstrated similar levels of imperative and declarative performative intent. Performative and presuppositional behaviors were…

A review of research on the relationship of otitis media (ear infection) and learning/language/hearing disorders revealed that incidence of otitis media was twice as common in learning disabled as nonLD students; and that, in general, otitis-prone children scored below controls with frequent evidence of performance deficits. (CL)

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

The study examined the possibility that children who omit word-final stops as a clinical entity may preserve the voicing contrast of those omitted stops by differential durations of the preceding vowel. (Author)

Different models of the relationship between language and cognition imply different types of developmental data. The relevance of these differences to Van Kleeck's model (1982) are examined. (Author)