Efficacy of object manipulation and picture identification to teach single words was assessed with four 23- to 40-month-old language impaired children at sensorimotor development level. Among results: two children learned more nouns and verbs in object manipulation condition. (Author)

Results of syntactic and semantic comparisons of 10 retarded children (mean age nine years), 10 normal, and 10 language impaired children matched for MA indicated that retarded children's language abilities were essentially comparable to the normal children without the same linguistic deficiencies as the language impaired children. (Author/CL)

The separate effects of child neglect, abuse, and their interaction upon language development as measured by the Preschool Language Scale were examined in four groups of children (N=79). Findings suggest that child neglect may be the critical type of maltreatment associated with language delay. (Author/CL)

The paper summarizes recent thinking on several aspects of early childhood stuttering, including the acquisition of fluency in young children and its relationship to language acquisition, the relationship of normal childhood nonfluencies to early stuttering, stuttering's relationship to language acquisition, and psycholinguistic influences on…

Meaningful activities are described that are designed to elicit five language functions normally required in relating socially in school settings while stating personal needs; directing the actions of self and others; giving information; reasoning; judging, and predicting; and imagining and projecting into nonclassroom situations. (Author/CL)

Seventeen Down's Syndrome (DS) children (9-12 years old) scored significantly lower than retarded non-DS and nonretarded students on arts of the Token Test for Children requiring sequential or syntactic processing. Ss showed no deficits in tasks requiring spatial/simultaneous processing. Results suggested a possible right-hemisphere dominance for…

Stutterers (N=201) and their nonstuttering same sex siblings were distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Late talkers had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings. (Author/CL)

Interactions between phonology and syntax were inspected in continuous speech samples, from 30 speech-delayed children. Results indicated that two-thirds of the Ss displayed evidence of overall syntactic delay, whereas half showed some limitations in use of phonetically complex morphophonemes, their performance in that area being below the level…

Normal-hearing elementary school-age children (N=180) performed rote sequencing language tasks, named colors, and told their birthday. For the six automatic and semiautomatic expressive language tasks, maturational trends were noted for all observations. Central tendency values and standard deviations by grades for the six tasks are reported.…

Four language disordered children (4 to 9 years old) were presented with a four-step program designed to achieve generalization of target grammatical rules to spontaneous discourse. Trained target rules increased in frequency while untrained rules did not. (Author)

A nonverbal assessment procedure was designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework with six autistic children, five echolalic and one nonverbal, ranging in age from 4.8 to 15.2. All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI, and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and…

Criticism of Manually Coded English (MCE) with deaf children is examined in terms of its classification as a language, its inadequate rate of information flow, and its inexact use. Research on MCE is reviewed, and it is suggested that MCE systems are not being used to their best advantage. (CL)

The use, by three young language-disordered children, of two devices through which utterances are related to ongoing discourses, focus and substitution operations, was observed. A developmental trend reflecting that of the normally developing children emerged. (Author)

Results showed that "loose training" (conducting concurrent language training during an academic task and allowing the student to initiate a language response based on a wide array of naturaly occurring stimulus events) was effective in establishing a specific set of language responses in two moderately retarded 10 and 12 year olds. (Author/CL)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)