The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

Intended for the teacher of handicapped children, the article describes some symptoms of language processing difficulty. Prerequisite skills for language comprehension are reviewed, and characteristics which can help to identify children with receptive language problems are listed. (SBH)

Describes study of relationship between seven specific factors and receptive language development of fourth and seventh grade culturally-different students. (JM)

Noncomprehension signaling by 16 school-age children with mild mental retardation was compared with performance of 16 typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age. Message type and speaker were manipulated in a direction-following task. Message type, not speaker, influenced noncomprehension signaling, with no intergroup…

Compares written stories of normally achieving and learning disabled (LD) children in grades 1-3. Tests receptive language, figure copying, and spelling. Finds that groups differed on figure copying, spelling, and written productivity, but not receptive language. Finds that non-LD grade level groups differed on two components of the handwriting…

Three studies investigated 3-year-olds' comprehension of indirectly and directly learned words after a 2-day delay. Found indirectly and directly learned proper and common names resulted in proper name mappings that picked out individual and common name mappings that could be extended to another category member. When additional, sometimes…

Performance of 32 children with language impairment and 22 without, on perception and imitation of synthesized syllables, found that phoneme perception ability of children with only expressive impairment fell between that of controls and expressive-receptive impaired children. Both groups of subjects had difficulty with phonological memory, but…

Discusses "hermeneutics" and "inner speech" in an attempt to broaden the current theoretical basis for describing foreign language listening as a dynamically interpretive language process. A pedagogical model is proposed for the teaching of academic listening skills in the foreign language classroom. (Author/CB)

Children with language learning problems (N=151) and normally learning children (N=143) were tested on fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks that required responding to small acoustic differences. Performance on the auditory tasks was highly correlated with group placement suggesting that fine-grained auditory discrimination makes a major…

Tracking as a technique for training and evaluating speechreaders' reception of connected discourse is redefined, and some of its modifications are presented. Also noted are issues in the use of tracking, such as verbatim response, talker learning, and material selection, and recommendations for preparing speechreaders for the tracking task. (JDD)

This study investigated the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception as processed by children with mild to severe hearing impairments. Results suggested that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level (thus normally distracting) but that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped…

Twenty-one apparently normal children (ages 18 to 34 months) with slow expressive language acquisition were evaluated initially and again at age 3. The late talkers also scored significantly lower in receptive communication and socialization. Followup showed nearly half the group remained delayed in expressive communication and socialization,…

Discusses methods of assessing language comprehension in apes. Considers the possible effect of brain physiology on the differences between productive and receptive language skills. Examines the possibility that differences between synaptic transmission and volume transmission, or transmission across extracellular spaces, of neurological impulses…

A 1-year followup of 10 children with delayed onset of early speech skills found that all 4 children who were still delayed had been delayed in language comprehension and gesture tasks the previous year whereas the 6 children who had "caught up" had demonstrated age-appropriate language comprehension and gesture usage earlier. (Author/DB)

Two experiments examined preschoolers' ability to apply multiple labels to representational objects and to people. Found that preschoolers reliably produced or accepted several words per entity and accepted a high percentage of class-inclusive and overlapping word pairs. The mean number of words produced in labeling task was related to receptive…