The paper describes the Makaton Vocabulary as an alternative communication mode for children and adults with communication and language difficulties. The language program comprises the following components: a core vocabulary based on concepts/items needed to express essential needs and experiences; the use of signs and/or symbols always associated…

A longitudinal study of the language development of children of adolescent mothers followed 20 adolescent and 20 older mothers from their children's birth through three years of age. This report is based on data collected from a subsample of 20 mothers. Mother-child interactions in feeding, teaching, and play at eight months and two years were…

A study identified discourse patterns in potential disputes, deflected disputes, incomplete, and completed disputes from a one-hour conversation involving two 3-year-old female children and one female adult. These varied dispute episodes were identified, coded, and analyzed using a pragmatic model of adult argumentation focusing on the structures,…

The empirical study of knowledge representation is the focus of this paper, which observes that language as the cognitive instrument in the communication of phenomena must be capable of expressing relations of the observer-observation kind. The paper points out that this implies a coopeartive process at work in the production of a text, of which…

A study compared selected language features of children in five different reading programs. Selected for study were two first grade classes from each of five urban school districts that were using either the Lippincott, Language Experience, Houghton Mifflin, Open Court, or the Ginn 720 basal reading programs. A prereading test was administered to…

"Journeys Unlimited," a piece of theater-in-education performed by Australia's Bouverie St. Theatre-in-Education team during one term in 1979 and described in this paper, formed an integral component of a larger curriculum development program undertaken in Australian primary schools. This analysis of "Journeys Unlimited" is…

Five papers describe clinical research completed by graduate students in speech-language pathology and audiology. The first study examines the linguistic input of three adults (a mother, teacher, and clinician) to a language impaired 8-year-old. The clinician's approach, less directive than that of the other two, facilitated spontaneous speech and…

A fundamental principle of second language acquisition is stated and applied to language teaching. The principle states that learners acquire a second language when they receive comprehensible input in situations where their affective filters are sufficiently low. The theoretical background of this principle consists of five hypotheses: the…

The general question of how well parents' reports about their preschool children predict school performance was addressed in this study. In addition, the effects of several population characteristics--sex, socioeconomic status (SES), child's age, and birth order--upon the validity of parent reports were investigated. Parents of 391 preschool…

The teaching of politeness formulas and their spontaneous use by young children were investigated. The use of such formulas as greetings and thanks was studied in terms of the cultural features that may interact with the learning of such formulas and the analyses children make concerning the situations in which they are used. Conversations were…

The connections among language learning, language education, and children's wordplay are explored in this book. Each chapter examines some aspect of the interrelations between wordplay activities and the goals of language education. The book is divided into three sections, with the first section exploring wordplay and language learning in the…

The report reviews assessment guidelines developed for visually impaired infants (birth-24 months). Project staff examined research on the assessment of infants with vision loss and identified material relevant to their needs. Following a review of existing assessment tools, guidelines were prepared in the following areas: social competence,…

The paper details the impact of blindness and visual impairments on young children's development. Specific developmental risks are examined for the following areas (sample difficulties in parentheses): body awareness (delayed concept of object permanence), motor development (lack of incentive to explore and resultant delay in purposeful movement),…

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study…

Because language delay tends to persist, is predictive of later learning problems, and is closely associated with psychiatric disorders, it is important to identify language delay as early as possible. In this study, language delay at age 2 was investigated in 502 children who attended physicians. Language assessment is not routinely carried out…