The paper reports on a study of the rate of language learning of 12 children aged 2 to 10 with severe to profound bilateral hearing losses. Intended to help deaf children learn spoken language at the same rate as average hearing Ss, the intervention stressed three qualities of linguistic information: (1) clarity, (2) appropriateness, and (3)…

The monograph describes a systematic attempt to develop language behavior in a nonverbal autistic 4.5-year-old boy who was essentially unresponsive to environmental stimuli of any kind. The 45-session intervention focused on teaching him to attend, increasing his responsiveness to people, effecting discriminative responses to a variety of…

Five children, aged 7-10 years, exhibiting Developmental Verbal Apraxia (DVA) were evaluated to determine the presence of word-retrieval problems. DVA is a symptom cluster including at least some of 21 potential symptoms, such as delayed speech development and severe articulation disorder. The Boston Naming Test (a picture confrontation naming…

The Indochinese student brings a unique set of linguistic, cultural, and psychological problems to the English as a second language (ESL) classroom. Indochinese refugees may be illiterate in their first language, lack the prior education needed to cope with a formalized learning situation, have traditional learning and study patterns that…

Noted are implications of and results of correlations among the three types of tests. (CH)

The author reviews studies in which operant training techniques were used to develop and remediate the speech and language skills of vocal imitation, functional speech, generative speech, and generalized speech usage in autistic, severely retarded, echolalic, and other nonverbal Ss. (LC)

Part of a master's thesis by John E. Gordon, George Peabody College.

Two studies were conducted to test the view that the early reading difficulties experienced by boys result from a "difference" in the way they use language, not their "deficit" in language ability. The first study replicated previous findings that young boys outperform young girls in receptive language ability although they perform less well in…

Approximately 290 deaf college freshmen participated in a study of the relationship between perceived and actual abilities in eight communication modes (including reading, writing, speech reading with and without sound, and reception of manual and simultaneous communication). Ss rated their abilities before and after a communication course. Actual…

The importance of human communication is the focus of this guide for improving language habits, which explores both various communication problems and techniques for handling them. Topics discussed are as follows: bad language habits; words as symbols which do not dictate the nature of things in the real world; inaccurate communication which…

Evidence for speaker knowledge of morphological patterns, both derivational and inflectional, is not limited to productive patterns. Nonproductive patterns appear to be accessible in such a way that accessibility (a term preferred to "psychological reality") may be viewed as a function of four somewhat interdependent factors: (1) productivity, (2)…

Assessed were the effects of verbal placeholding and full verbal rehearsal (verbalizing aloud the critical components and sequence) on the direction following behavior of 14 institutionalized retarded adolescents (mean IQ 48). A control group from the same institution participated in practice sessions without the verbal rehearsal stress. Pre- and…

Scholars agree that listening is an active rather than a passive process. The listening which makes people achieve higher scores on current listening tests is "second speaker" listening or active participation in the encoding of the message. Most of the instructional suggestions in listening curriculum guides are based on this concept. In terms of…