This longitudinal case study follows the development of a woman with autism from mutism at age 10 to acquisition of a range of spoken and written language skills by age 26. Results support hypotheses that both spoken and written language may become feasible forms of communication in such cases, although some skills may plateau or decline.…

Examines the roles of instrumentality, expressivity, satisfaction with social support, and size of social network in predicting problem solving in 215 predominantly white undergraduates. Implications for the study of problem-solving skills and adaptive activities are discussed. (SLD)

This follow-up to a longitudinal speech and educational outcome study compared 24 adults (and their children) with history of moderate phonological-language disorder and 28 adults (and their children) with normal articulation as children. Children of the proband subjects performed significantly more poorly on all tests of articulation and…

The maladaptive behaviors, personality, and language skills of a male whose chromosome analysis showed evidence of mosaicism with karyotype 49,XXXXY and 48,XXXY are described. Research on severity of mental handicap with extra chromosomes, delayed speech development, and discrepancy between verbal and performance intelligence is examined. (JDD)

Approaches to the analysis of utterance disruptions are reviewed, and a system is proposed for analyzing disruptions in spontaneous language, with four disruption categories (pauses, repetitions, revisions, and orphans). Use of the system is illustrated using language samples from 10 traumatically brain-injured and 10 normally developing speakers…

Evaluation of the dialogue journals kept by 153 deaf students in pairs of deaf and hearing students (grades 4-12) in 10 public school districts found an improvement in the quality of the writing of the deaf students over time and changes in content and syntactic complexity. (DB)

A two-year-old child and an eight-year-old bonobo exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy were asked to respond to novel sentences. Both subjects comprehended novel requests and simple syntactic devices. The bonobo decoded the syntactic device of word recursion more accurately than the child; the child performed better than the bonobo…

This study of 80 autistic (ages 6-18), mentally handicapped, and normal children found that more autistic subjects used neologisms and idiosyncratic language than age- and language-skill-matched control groups. More autistic children used words inappropriately that were neither phonologically nor conceptually related to intended English words than…

Presents data that challenge the view that the omission of functional categories by children with specific language impairment is a manifestation of the same immaturity characterizing the grammar of young children without impairment. Data include atypically high omissions or even almost total absence of determiners in the speech productions of a…

This study tested the predictive validity of the Communication Composite of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales with 58 children (ages 17 to 34 months) functioning at the prelinguistic stage of language development. Evaluation of expressive vocabulary 1 year later found that the Communication Composite and all tested clusters were…

This study compared cultural differences in the eyewitness reporting of Navajo and mainstream-culture third graders who were questioned 10 days after an event. Mainstream-culture children reported more information overall but the groups did not differ in accuracy. Active participation affected the amount of information reported by…

The communication patterns of a 3-year-old boy who is blind were observed during 35 videotaped classroom sessions to determine if his echolalic responses varied according to school activity and message category. Analysis revealed that, although the child was expressive with adults, he had difficulty communicating with his peers and in producing…

A home-based interventionist effectively taught four mothers to embed the mand-model procedure in daily activities to teach expressive language skills to their young children with speech delays. During the intervention phase, parents were provided with feedback along with specific encouragement to use the individualized instructional program…

Fifty-two children identified at ages 4 and 6 as having an expressive phonology disorder were followed to the third and fourth grades. Children with a phonology disorder along with other language problems performed more poorly than the others on measures of phoneme awareness, language, reading decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling.…

Longitudinally compared the production of syllable shapes in 10-minute spontaneous speech samples of 20 children with expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E) and 15 typically developing (TD) peers from 24 to 36 months of age. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)