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.…

Explores four major areas of differences between first- and second-language acquisition (completeness, equipotentiality, previous knowledge, and fossilization) and argues that the theory of Universal Grammar plays a much smaller role in explaining the second-language acquisition process than current research claims. (Author/CB)

Focused on the developmental acquisition of the conditional implication interpretation of "if-then." Knowledge of three aspects of this interpretation was assessed for adults and 3rd-, 5th- and 8th-graders. Results showed the older three groups were significantly more likely to understand conditional implication, with improvement…

A study of how children acquire language suggests that schools and their structured classroom situations offer few opportunities for students to develop linguistic competence. Four approaches to increasing classroom communication are offered. (CB)

A comparison of vocal development in deaf and hearing infants indicates that well-formed syllable production is established in the first 10 months of life by hearing infants but not by deaf infants, suggesting that audition plays an important role in vocal development. (PCB)

The research on metalinguistics in language-impaired children is reviewed indicating that deficits are not all-pervasive but focus on tasks that require sophisticated linguistic abilities or explicit judgments about language form. Such deficits may result from basic encoding problems of cognitive material. (DB)

Three experiments investigated children's acquisition of tense and aspect. Children aged 3-6 years watched and described actions of puppets. The vast majority used appropriate tense, with 3-year-olds using mainly simple past and 4-year-olds encoding most situations with the past progressive. (SKC)

The article looks at syntactic deficiencies involving simple clause structures and grammatical morphology in young children. A framework for understanding the development of simple clause structures is presented followed by a discussion of the correlates of early syntactic development. Procedures to assess and remediate syntactic deficiencies are…

The ISU/ChiLDES bibliographic database, a nonprofit computerized database dedicated to language acquisition, currently consists of nearly 1,900 annotated bibliographic references to journal articles dating back to 1972. (CB)

Two experiments test hypothesis that development of children's comprehension monitoring skills in the referential communication paradigm is based in part on ability to differentiate the literal sentence meaning of speaker's direction from the meaning or intention that speaker wished to convey. (Author/RWB)