Nine infants with Down's syndrome, seven nonhandicapped infants, and one severely handicapped infant were given the choice of listening to familiar nursery rhymes or to the same rhymes with each word reversed so that the rhythms, intonation and stress patterns were kept intact but the words became nonsense. (RH)

The role of the administrator as helper is discussed in terms of two processes involved in a helpful supervisory relationship--individual goal-setting conferences, and positive communication. (JMF)

A study involving seven adults with sensorineural hearing loss and seven controls investigated perceptual weight given format transition and relative amplitude information for labeling fricative place of articulation perception and integration of relative amplitude and formant transition cues. Subjects had lower interaction terms for F2 transition…

This study compared the receptive language of adolescents and young adults with either Down syndrome (n=25), fragile X syndrome (n=19), or mental age matched typically developing children (n=24). Individuals with the syndromes differed in relative achievements across the domains of receptive vocabulary, receptive syntax, nonverbal cognition, and…

A study examined how 20 adults with postlingual deafness with cochlear implants combined visual information from lip reading with auditory cues in an open-set word recognition task. Word recognition performance was highest for audiovisual presentation followed by auditory-only and then visual-only stimulus presentation, and for single-talker…

This study compared 34 adults who had shown early delays in language (high functioning autism) with 42 similar individuals with no such delays (Asperger Syndrome). No significant differences were found between groups on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), their social outcome ratings or ADI-R scores based on current functioning, or on…

A study assessed auditory sequential, short-term memory (SSTM) performance in 24 children (ages 5-11) using cochlear implants (CI). The CI group did not have a sequential memory deficit specific to the auditory modality. Visual spatial memory was the main predictor of variance in the language scores of the CI group. (Contains references.)…

Two experiments investigated the effects of peer modeling on the acquisition of receptive and expressive language responses. Experiment 1 studied lexical learning among five children who were mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. Experiment 2 investigated the observational learning of receptive and expressive language responses by two…

Responds to Dunn's paper on Hispanic-Anglo differences in IQ scores. Comments on Dunn's translation of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised into Castilian Spanish, and concludes this version is inappropriate for mainland Puerto Rican and Mexican-American children due to improper translation and validation methods. Contains 27 references.…

Noun and verb comprehension of 11 children with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments was assessed by presenting a linguistic stimulus and determining whether the child watched a video event that matched or did not match the stimulus. Subjects, aged 2-6, watched the match significantly more, especially when dynamic visual stimuli were…

Using a set of fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks, 21 children with language-learning problems were compared with 21 normal children, aged six-nine. Across three years, children with language-learning problems showed poorer auditory discrimination for temporally based acoustic differences, poorer receptive vocabulary and language…

Thirty-four children (ages 5-16) born to alcoholic mothers were assessed on measures of intelligence, reading, receptive vocabulary, memory for sentences, visual memory, and visual-motor integration. The children were found to be least deficient on intellectual measures and most deficient on memory for sentences and silent and oral readings.…

This experiment sought to define a confidence limit for maximum word-recognition scores obtained from 212 young and elderly adults with confirmed cochlear hearing loss. A 95% confidence limit was found and supported through analysis, although it is suggested that, in some cases, word recognition should be measured at additional levels to obtain…

Six young children (ages 25 to 40 months) with delays in language comprehension were presented with stimulus items in 3 conditions: (1) object cue and speech, (2) movement cue and speech, or (3) speech alone. All children identified referents with fewer trials when object or movement cues were used with speech compared to use of speech alone.…

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…