Seventeen Down's Syndrome (DS) children (9-12 years old) scored significantly lower than retarded non-DS and nonretarded students on arts of the Token Test for Children requiring sequential or syntactic processing. Ss showed no deficits in tasks requiring spatial/simultaneous processing. Results suggested a possible right-hemisphere dominance for…

Stutterers (N=201) and their nonstuttering same sex siblings were distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Late talkers had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings. (Author/CL)

Interactions between phonology and syntax were inspected in continuous speech samples, from 30 speech-delayed children. Results indicated that two-thirds of the Ss displayed evidence of overall syntactic delay, whereas half showed some limitations in use of phonetically complex morphophonemes, their performance in that area being below the level…

Normal-hearing elementary school-age children (N=180) performed rote sequencing language tasks, named colors, and told their birthday. For the six automatic and semiautomatic expressive language tasks, maturational trends were noted for all observations. Central tendency values and standard deviations by grades for the six tasks are reported.…

Four language disordered children (4 to 9 years old) were presented with a four-step program designed to achieve generalization of target grammatical rules to spontaneous discourse. Trained target rules increased in frequency while untrained rules did not. (Author)

A nonverbal assessment procedure was designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework with six autistic children, five echolalic and one nonverbal, ranging in age from 4.8 to 15.2. All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI, and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and…

Criticism of Manually Coded English (MCE) with deaf children is examined in terms of its classification as a language, its inadequate rate of information flow, and its inexact use. Research on MCE is reviewed, and it is suggested that MCE systems are not being used to their best advantage. (CL)

The use, by three young language-disordered children, of two devices through which utterances are related to ongoing discourses, focus and substitution operations, was observed. A developmental trend reflecting that of the normally developing children emerged. (Author)

Results showed that "loose training" (conducting concurrent language training during an academic task and allowing the student to initiate a language response based on a wide array of naturaly occurring stimulus events) was effective in establishing a specific set of language responses in two moderately retarded 10 and 12 year olds. (Author/CL)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

A study investigated the differential effects of psycholinguistic training programs on Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) scores obtained by educable mentally retarded, trainable mentally retarded, and culturally-economically disadvantaged preschool and elementary students. (Author/SW)

The paper presents the basics of the design, function, and construction of communication boards for use with the severely disabled. (Author/SW)

The efficacy of employing linguistic elements (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) arranged in systematic combination matrices on the development of expressive verb-noun phrase usage was demonstrated when two of three moderately to severely handicapped six- and seven-year-old students showed gains in trained and novel responses. (CL)

A nonverbal assessment procedure designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework was administered to six autistic children, (4.8 to 15.2 years old). All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and concrete operations. (Author)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)