In interviews, children understood past forms equally well in reference to immediate and remote past but future forms better in reference to the immediate future. Immediacy of action and certainty of occurrence are suggested as early meaning components of future verb forms. (Author)

Results demonstrated that when compared with normally developing children of the same mental age, the Down's syndrome Ss (6 to 12 years old) evidenced a more homogeneous pattern of syntactic usage and tended to acquire only low-level syntactic structures, as identified by the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure. (Author)

Recounts an incident illustrating a child's development of communication skills and offers suggestions for parents to help facilitate that development. (HTH)

The results of the specific research which led up to the program of instruction are presented in detail in the research program; deaf children as young as 10 years of age were shown to be capable of understanding metaphorical language with regularity. (Author)

A reliable clinical taxonomy of illocutionary acts for young language learning children was determined and the distributions of those illocutionary acts in naturalistic play situations with 12 Down syndrome and nondelayed children (20 to 89 months) and their mothers were examined. (Author)

Reviews and compares the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky on the relationships between child language and thought, as presented in their respective works, "The Language and Thought of the Child" and "Thought and Language." (SJL)

Presents a critical review of studies designed to teach language production skills to children with specific language impairment. The evidence reviewed suggests that a number of training approaches are effective, often resulting in gains that exceed the rate seen in normal development, provided the speaking situation resembles enough the training…

Scores on the Picture Arrangement subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised of 41 eight-year-olds referred for academic learning difficulties were analyzed. Results suggested that visual sequencing skills and language development skills are necessary prerequisites for reading and spelling. (CL)

The relationship between child age and mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU) was studied in a sample of 123 middle to upper middle class midwestern children, aged 17 to 59 months, conversing with mothers in free play. A significant correlation was found between age and MLU: r=.88. (Author)

Examines three broad functions that underlie all use of language--language for learning (language as a representation of the world), language for living, and language for linking (connected discourse in context). Considers teacher knowledge of these language functions essential if the teachers are to guide student language acquisition. (RL)

The amount and type of disfluences in the speech of language delayed preschoolers receiving language therapy (N=9) and not (N=9) and nine normal controls were examined. Comparisons indicated that Ss who received language therapy had significantly more word and part word repititions than the other two groups. (Author)

Critiques previous research concerning differences in voice onset time discrimination between Spanish and English infants and conclusions about the effect of early linguistic experience on speech perception. (RMH)

Argues that Aslin and Pisoni's criticisms are basically unwarranted on both methodological and conceptual grounds. (RMH)

The questions 17 mothers addressed to their children, aged 18-34 months, during a play session were examined for the purpose they served in the conversation and the forms used to express them. (RH)

Noam Chomsky proposed that when children learn a language they do not learn to imitate given sentences; rather, they learn rules by which an infinite number of sentences can be produced and understood. This essay discusses the impact which this has had on the way educators view language and learning. (KC)