Examines Frank Smith's analysis of the reading process with respect to comprehension, specifically, his assertion that during the reading process, comprehension of meaning precedes word identification. Discusses the implications of Smith's analysis for the teaching of reading. (JM)

The follow-up study reports data from a population-based series of 23 Swedish children diagnosed in childhood as suffering from infantile autism and other childhood psychoses and followed through to the ages of 16-23 years. Intelligence quotient at diagnosis and communicative speech development before six years were the most important prognostic…

The pronunciation of stop consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant words by 45 preschool children (15 with speech disorders) was evaluated. In the speech-disordered group, errors in initial position differed from those in final position. Voicing errors occurred most frequently in initial position, and glottal stop realizations in final position.…

Comparison of the fast mapping skills of language-impaired four- and five-year-olds (N=11) and nondisabled peers (N=11) revealed no differences in ability to infer a connection between a novel word and referent, to comprehend a novel word after a single exposure, and to recall nonlinguistic information associated with the referent. (Author/CB)

Four keynote papers, presented at an international conference on sign language research, discussed general linguistic issues of sign language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. (CB)

A study of 16 autistic children (mean age 54.5 months) found functional and symbolic play skills associated with language ability and certain nonverbal skills (such as the ability to use gestures to coordinate attention between social partners) also correlated with language ability, but not with play variables. (Author/DB)

Evaluation of performance on the Preschool Language Scale of 18 low-vision children (two to four years old) found lower performance than for sighted peers, especially on the Auditory Comprehension Quotient, the Verbal Ability Quotient, and the overall Language Quotient. (Author/DB)

The article discusses several linguistic and nonlinguistic teaching strategies to foster language acquisition and increase spontaneous language in preschool children with language delays. Techniques include having the child complete unfinished sentences and intentionally violating an expected routine to elicit the child's language. (DB)

Matrix training strategies were used to teach three severely mentally retarded children syntactic rules for combining known words into two- and three-word utterances. Training only a limited number of responses was sufficient to promote recombinative generalization in the trained modality and transfer to untrained responses in the opposite…

Assessment of category knowledge and receptive language skills of 16 autistic (3-6 years old), mentally retarded, and normal children indicated that the autistic children's knowledge of function, form, and color categories was comparable to that of the mental-age-matched mentally retarded and normal comparison groups. (Author/DB)

Children ages 1 1/2 to 3 years were tested to determine their comprehension of the terms "in,""on," and "under." It was found that children who listened to a pretest story involving the objects to be used in the study showed markedly better comprehension of the terms than children not exposed to the pretest activity.…

Discusses a study of discourse patterns in the learning of second language oral skills. The study, based on research traditions such as ethnography of communication and conversation analysis, adopts as its main theoretical framework Vygotsky's theory of social origin of language and cognition. (DJD)

Investigates language-normal one-year-olds' (N=14) and language-impaired two- and three-year-olds' (N=10) acquisition of words referring to three types of action. Findings revealed that, although both groups produced few of the words, the language-normal subjects comprehended the different types of action, whereas the impaired subjects did not.…