The Learning Cycle as an instructional strategy in science consists of three phases: exploration, concept introduction, and concept application. The strategy's support of language development in students with deafness is noted, and three lessons are presented: force (primary level), physical properties of matter (older elementary), and properties…

The hypothesis that good guessers are good second-language learners is investigated. Focus is on one characteristic, cognitive style, of successful and unsuccessful learners. Overall, the study provides continuing evidence for the positive relationship between field independence and English-as-a-Second-Language proficiency. (45 references) (LB)

The syntactic development of preschoolers (n=22) who later became disabled readers was compared to that of similar children who became normal readers. Expressive and receptive syntactic abilities were examined from age 30 to 60 months. The dyslexic group was poorer on all measures until age five, when both groups exhibited similar syntactic…

Examines the early production of 9 cohesive devices during narration about personal experience in an 18-month longitudinal study of 10 children between the ages of 2 and 3.6. The specification of noun phrases and types of noun errors is explored. (35 references) (GLR)

Focuses on a single rule of grammar to produce evidence of a memory system for language acquisition and processing that is modular; independent of real-world meaning; unaffected by frequency and similarity; sensitive to formal distinctions; more sophisticated than the explicitly-taught rules it subsumes; developed independently of ambient input;…

This study assessed the family history of speech, language, and school problems in 62 young children (mean age 28 months) with developmental expressive language delay (ELD). Comparison with normally developing children indicated no strong familial component of ELD. (Author/DB)

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

Mothers' utterances were measured during interactions with their 13-month-old infants and correlated with measures of infants' productive lexical development at 13 and 24 months. Correlations between maternal measures and infants' lexical development were lower for employed mothers than for mothers who were full-time caregivers. (BC)

The order of acquisition of a set of linguistic structures and the relationship between structures were examined over 5 years in 28 language-impaired children (age 4) and 32 language-matched normal children. Results demonstrated a marked similarity between groups, suggesting that the linguistic impairments may be principally processing, not…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…

A survey of 124 teachers of students (ages 2-25) with deafness and blindness found that types of learning tasks used were often at variance with learning needs of the students. Teachers preferred methods of structuring learning tasks over methods that stress sensory input. Teachers did not prefer approaches that stress language development. (JDD)

Presents evidence for a theory that children learning Russian at a certain age know a syntactic principle that governs the distribution of pronouns, but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle that restricts the situations in which noun phrases may be contraindexed. (Contains 48 references.) (JP)

Data from a transcript database of 12 children collected in 1-hour samples every month from 1;0 to 3;0 support the hypothesis that there should be strong differences in the frequency and types of errors between pronouns with suppletive nominatives and those without. The suppletive nominative forms "I" and "she" are blocked from overextension in a…

Discusses flaws that undermine the validity and generalizability of S. Neuman and P. Koskinen's "Captioned Television as Comprehensible Input: Effects of Incidental Word Learning from Context for Language Minority Students," published in an earlier issue of this journal. (RS)

Responds to criticisms raised in another article in this issue concerning a study of incidental word learning among second-language learners viewing captioned television. Suggests that the criticisms fail to "see the forest for the trees." Responds to specific methodological criticisms. (RS)