Describes a study designed to explore the nature of early use of two forms of the perfect--the present perfect and the present perfect progressive--by children over three years old. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: verb form, semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the…

Describes a study that tried to answer the following: (1) Are the passives of all actional verbs equally easy to understand? (2) Are the passives of all experiential verbs in a child's vocabulary about equally hard to understand? (3) Does comprehension of passives differ from verb to verb in a category? (SED)

Analysis of articulation and stress patterns of five young (18-30 months of age) hearing children of deaf parents revealed that phonological processes used most frequently were those identified as common processes among children from hearing homes. None of the children adopted, with any frequency, the less typical productions found in their…

Reports on a study of the acquisition of fingerspelling, a manual system for representing the alphabet, by young deaf children whose first language is American Sign Language. Describes the system of fingerspelling and its use in the American deaf community and discusses the interaction of fingerspelling and signed language. (SED)

The paper reviews research on the choice discrimination program, a method of teaching receptive language to severely handicapped children. The writer's own work using this method is compared to previous research, and he suggests that the approach may be useful with other groups. (CL)

Research conducted at the Waisman Center on Mental Retardation and Human Development over the past 10 years documents the multidimensional nature of language development in retarded and nonretarded populations. Advances in research methodology will allow large-scale indepth studies of the lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects of…

Explores the early use of "behind" and "in front of" with large reference objects among 33 children. The patterns for the use of these locatives suggest an acquisition process in which new conceptual resources lead to the re-analysis of object configurations and thus to new aspects of meaning. (SED)

The article describes ways in which music and elements of rhythm, harmony, melody, form dynamics, and mood can contribute to language development in learning disabled children. (CL)

The way in which children organize their discourse is examined, and the steps involved in topic initiation, maintenance, and development are traced with examples highlighting the interaction of text, topics, an goals/functions. Implications for cross-cultural language development are briefly considered. (CL)

Two norm-referenced tests--Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language (TACL) and Preschool Language Scale (PLS) and one criterion-referenced task, the Basic Two-Choice Object Discrimination Task--were administered to nine severely handicapped preschoolers. Overall, performance and behavioral ratings tended to be best for the Two-Choice Task and…

The paper discusses and corrects eight common misconceptions about language impairments in children. It is pointed out as invalid to characterize language impaired children as lazy, manipulative, stubborn, or disturbed or to focus on typical characteristics (such as behavior problems) as the causes of language impairment. (CL)

A young hearing impaired child on a kibbutz received eight years of individual tutoring from a special education teacher and grew into a sociable, outgoing girl with adequate language and cognitive skills. (CL)

A simultaneous treatments design was used to compare effects of modeling and corrected practice on generative language acquisition of six preschoolers. New syntactic forms used to describe agent-action-object stimuli were taught concurrently. All six children learned both new syntactic forms. Corrected practice produced a faster rate of learning.…

General guidelines are presented for the assessment of children's pragmatic behaviors. Specific evaluation procedures and activities are described for each component of the organizational framework detailed in Part 1: communicative intention, presupposition, and the social organization of discourse. (Author)

Learning disabled children ages 8-11 may need help to request clarification of speakers (an intergral part of everyday conversation) through activities designed to increase their facility with question forms and improve referential communication skills. (CL)