Purpose: The purpose of this longitudinal correlational study was to test whether an environmental variable and 4 child variables predicted growth rate of number of different nonimitative words used (i.e., lexical density). Method: Thirty-five young (age range = 21-54 months) children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who were initially…

Background: Children who have reached the age of 2 years without having acquired a 50-word vocabulary and/or who use no word combinations are referred to in the literature as "Late Talkers". Research has not yet identified the factors that cause slow development of expressive language; in particular, relatively little research has been carried out…

Three teachers of 11 primary age hearing impaired children were trained to use expansions (complete adult grammatical imitations of a child's incomplete utterance). (Author)

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism has applications to rhetoric and composition instruction. Dialogism, sometimes translated as intertextuality, is the term Bakhtin used to designate the relation of one utterance to other utterances. Dialogism is not dialogue in the usual sense of the word; it is the context which informs utterance, and…

Some new approaches to the assessment and treatment of language handicaps suggest the need to examine relationships between verbal creativity and language performance. Data were collected from 40 normally developing white fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children, drawn from both urban and rural communities and from a middle socioeconomic level.…

Court trials are formalized disputes in which the parties are denied confrontation and have restrictions placed on their rights to tell the story. The rights of telling are part of discourse rights, and in the courtroom they are circumscribed by attorneys' objections to either the other attorneys' questions or the witnesses' answers. This can be…

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

Two speech styles, origin-myth telling and ritual wailing, found among the Shokleng Indians of south Brazil are analyzed from the perspective of two specific functions of speech style: (1) for indexing or highlighting the subject matter in certain contexts, and (2) for relating the contexts and subject matters to other contexts and subject matters…

Expressiveness in language is necessary for effective communication in every field. Prose should be effective not only in literature but also in science, business, law, and other specialized fields. Writing institutes across the country specialize in a new pedagogy for teaching expository prose, and one of the chief instruments for clarifying this…

A study to develop a methodology for discovering how one important notion or semantic category, "frequency of occurrence," is expressed in words, phrases, or other linguistic devices in academic English began with a search for devices expressing that notion, by analyzing text from a news magazine, a New Zealand geography textbook, and a…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

The handbook, intended for use as a guide for special education teachers, presents an overview of language arts and communication skills. Instructional considerations and teaching ideas (objectives and activities) are presented for three major types of skills: (1) receptive language arts (listening skills, reading, phonics, sight vocabulary,…

An instructional procedure to improve communication skills was used with four trainable retarded children (ages 8 to 10 years). (DB)

Investigates the role of social factors and marital status in the use of expletives among married and single American women between the ages of 40 and 55. (AM)