Maternal education is a strong correlate of children's language, cognitive, and academic development. In most prior research, mothers' education has been treated as a fixed characteristic, yet many mothers, particularly economically and educationally disadvantaged mothers, attend school after the birth of their children. In the present study, we…

Research Findings: Child care delivery practices promoting continuous, primary caregiver-child relationships (relationship-focused child care) were evaluated for 223 preschool-age children (45% African American, 55% Latino) attending child care centers serving low-income children. Both relationship-focused and non-relationship-focused centers were…

The case study examines the effects on the receptive and expressive English language of a deaf 14 year old after a period of limited language immersion using Cued Speech, in which every sound in a word is represented both expressively and receptively. In a four week period the S spent approximately 14 hours per week with a modeler who cued speech…

Parental estimates (N=24) of their normal and high-risk preschool children's vocabulary ability were compared to children's scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised. Results suggested that although parents tended to overestimate ability, their estimates were somewhat useful for placing children in a broad classification range. (NRB)

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)

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 relationship between the use of concrete objects and pictorial representations of those objects when teaching noun labels to 3 autistic boys was analyzed. Although results indicated no consistent functional relationship between the two types of stimulus presentation, there were varying degrees of generalization between the two conditions.…

Suggests that the growth of receptive language functioning in very young children is a crucial developmental area and summarizes some major issues involved in attempting to learn more about it. Portions of this text were included in an invited presentation at the 1969 Conference on Research and Teaching of Infant Development, Merrill-Palmer…

Two experiments, with about five autistic children (two to 14 years old) in each experiment, assessed the effects of autistic immediate echolalia on acquisition and generalization of receptive labeling tasks. These results indicated that echolalia faciliated generalization for echolalic autistic children but not for functionally mute autistic…

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…

A study investigated the effect of foreign accent and speaking rate on native English speaker comprehension. Three native Chinese speakers and one native speaker of American English read passages at different speaking rates. Comprehension scores showed that an increase in speaking rate and heavily accented English decreased listener comprehension.…

This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

Investigation of the impact of speaking rate variations in the linguistic input provided to 32 school-age children (half with specific language impairment (SLI) found both SLI and typical children had similar recognition accuracy, but SLI children had significantly more difficulty with the production of novel words presented at a fast rate.…

Reports on a longitudinal study that investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. Findings show support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. (Author/VWL)

This study measured the receptive communication skills of 14 adults with significant intellectual disability living in community group homes in Connecticut. Group home staff members rated the 14 participants using a 14-item rating scale sensitive to the adult living situation. These individuals appeared to have relatively stronger skills for…