Found no correlations between types of play behavior and speech measures, that identification of objects upon verbal request was not related to any type of play behavior, and that comprehension of verbal requests for functional or representational play was positively correlated with the display of such play. Journal availability: J. B. Lippincott…

In studies involving 12 and 16 mentally retarded preschoolers, retarded children's lexical usage was examined as a function of informativeness. (Author/CL)

Suggests some theoretical explanations to account for the fact that some people are better able to communicate in writing than others, basing these explanations on second language acquisition research. (DD)

The article illustrates the use of commercial jingles as high interest, low-level reading and language arts materials for primary age mildly retarded students. It is pointed out that jingles can be used in teaching initial consonants, vocabulary words, and arithmetic concepts. (SBH)

An experiment was designed to answer the following: (1) can children as young as 2 1/2 to 3 years of age employ contextual cues in order to distinguish request from offers? and (2) do children's discrimination skills for these illocutionary acts improve with age? A model of the comprehension of illocutionary force is proposed. (Author/AM)

Compares Lodge's (1979) examples of children's use of the past tense in pretend play with examples of the use of other moods and of modal auxiliaries. (AM)

Tests the hypothesis that children are predisposed to learn suffixes rather than prefixes. Results of four experiments generally support the hypothesis. Importance of language learning strategies and influences of child's experience on strategy use are discussed. (JMB)

Establishes five premises on which language-centered reading is based and makes five recommendations for language-centered reading instruction. (DD)

Interprets high response consistency in imitation and semantic/syntactic substitutions as evidence of internalized control of grammar in severely retarded adolescents. Discusses teaching implications in terms of speaker ability to process basic semantic relationships. (Author/RL)

The syntactic nonconversational features of monologue speech were analyzed in nine normal Ss (ages 2 and 3 years), three at each of R.Brown's three language developmental stages. (Author/PHR)

Describes a language arts project which used students' own first names as the project theme. (DD)

This article discusses the linguistic background of two Italian children who lived with their parents for an extended period of time in Holland and for a brief time in Puerto Rico and spent vacations in Italy where their relatives spoke the dialects of Veneto and Friuli. (CFM)

This article describes a plan to develop bilingualism carried out by the parents of a child of pre-school age who died of brain cancer at the age of five. The child learned German, the language of his father, and Spanish, the language of his mother, consecutively. (CFM)

The article reports on aspects of a recent study of classroom practices in the teaching of ESL reading to Spanish children in bilingual programs. A major finding of the study was that ESL pupils were dropped from ESL reading instruction at a very low reading level (second book, second level), regardless of age. (Author/NQ)

The schema hypothesis proposed by Kagan and Lewis was used to make predictions concerning the preferences of infants 3 to 14 months old for speech stimuli. An operant response method was used in determining the infants' preferences for inflected, monotone, and scrambled natural speech stimuli. (MS)