Although research on the language of the disadvantaged child is receiving much impetus, few extant studies have been helpful to the teacher. This article reexamines widely held misconceptions about disadvantaged child language in light of modern linguistic and psycholinguistic advances. (WY)

Investigates the differences in syntactical structure of sentences written by school children of different ages and of different abilities within the same grade. Writing of certain adults is also studied. (MH)

Two experiments involving four and seven normal children four- to eight-years-old examined processes responsible for generative language acquisition and conditions likely to facilitate recombinative generalization. All children learned new syntactic rules to generate three word utterances, regardless of the orderings of agent, action, and object…

Comparison of language patterns of parents of 10 autistic and 10 normal young children indicated few significant differences other than that the parents of autistic Ss used more nonlanguage oriented language and spoke more often. Mothers' and fathers' language patterns differed in several ways, including that mothers took more active roles.…

Nine special education teachers participated in a language development minicourse emphasizing behavioral approaches. Results showed substantial increases in the teachers' use of skills in the week they were featured in the course. Further increases occurred for most skills when they were exposed to the full combination oF training methods. (CL)

Outlines work suggesting that research into children's learning of linguistic structure has progressed little in the last decade or so, identifying attitudinal and methodological difficulties, and suggesting a comparative method for identifying learning strategies as developed by individual children. (MP)

Preschool children were paired in 12 speaker-listener dyads in which the speaker described common familiar items, and the listener attempted to guess their identity. Postfeedback, the speakers used longer, more informative descriptions for items originally failed and shorter, less informative descriptions for items successfully guessed on the…

Mothers' language was highly related to the babies' focus of attention in play, but proportionately less related to vocalization than to the activity. (Author/CL)

Discusses children's comprehension of complex sentences as measured by a picture selection test. Concludes that the interplay of both syntactic factors, such as active vs. passive, and nonsyntactic factors, such as expectation, must be considered in any characterization of children's sentence comprehension ability. (EKN)

The study investigated receptive and expressive language skills in 11 preschool gifted children. It was concluded that as a group the gifted Ss did not have a better selection of deep structure and transformation rules than normal Ss. (SB)

While neither the linguistically normal nor the language-disordered groups had achieved an adult level of competence, normal children were much more aware of the interactive nature of discourse than language-disordered children. Language-disordered children frequently ignored and responded inappropriately to requests. (Author)