Presented is a design for teaching daily living, socialization, motor, academic, and language skills to deaf blind children in a residential setting. (SBH)

In the context of a conversation in French between the author and her young English-speaking son, this discussion of methodology, the relative importance of grammar, progress in grasping the mechanisms of a language, and communication based on real needs raises questions for foreign language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

A literature review pertaining to the teaching and learning of stress and intonation in native and second languages considers the functional movement, conversational English, the difficulty of learning stress/intonation, stress within words and sentences, difficulties for speakers of tone and syllable-timed languages, and tests of stress and…

A study on the improvement of language ability among preschool children in Vermillion, South Dakota, showed a lack of family support and other family problems, such as child abuse and neglect, in the homes of the experimental group children. Educators must redouble efforts to educate parents and the society in general about children's needs. (BB)

The Harpersbury Hospital School in Hertfordshire, England, developed a curriculum of "mothering," or intensive, structured interaction teaching, to promote development of language, cognition, and sociability in pupils with severe and complex learning difficulties. The process approach is based on the critical learning that infants…

The study measured hearing-impaired (N=106) students' reception of language presented via five modes: oral, aural, manual, oral-aural;, and simultaneous manual and oral. The simultaneous manual and oral and the manual modes received the highest ratings. Results are discussed in terms of theories of cognitive processing and selective attention.…

A longitudinal study of the effect of mothers' communication modes on the language development of children (N=149) with severe or profound hearing loss indicated that children whose mothers used oral communication had higher scores on measures of spoken language, whereas children whose mothers used manual communication had higher scores on…

Identifies five criteria for the selection of picture books, and discusses their potential benefits for children's reading attitudes and skills. The benefits discussed include offering a store of experiences, learning the possibilities of language, gaining an understanding of cultural heritages, developing imagination, and learning about…

Elaborates on R. M. Gagne's distinction between lateral and vertical transfer for written composition. Claims that the theory of lateral and vertical transfer as applied to writing is compatible with (1) current conceptions of declarative and procedural cognitive processes and (2) a balanced pedagogy of both student-centered and direct,…

Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…

The study reports quasilongitudinal data on 10 children at 2:0 and 2:5, and another 10 children at 2:9 and 3:3. The analysis included word-initial and word-final phonetic inventories of consonant singletons and clusters and a summary of the relative frequency of seven word shapes. (Author/JDD)

Describes a five-month project wherein three classes of sophomore language arts students with reading and writing deficiencies wrote and produced plays. Claims this "constructivist" technique is effective because individual components of language are acquired intuitively as the learner engages actively in discourse with other active readers and…

Two deaf children of deaf parents were studied over a period of several years for their acquisition of "-ing", "-'s"; "-s", "-d", and the particle "to." Although the children soon perceived the signed forms of these morphemes, they were slow to understand the function of the morphemes. (Author/LMO)

Four severely/profoundly hearing-impaired preschool children (ages 4-5) were given six vocabulary tasks (receptive, associative, and expressive) involving auditory and visual sensory modalities. Data confirmed that lipreading (visual modality) could be substituted for speech. However, for novice lipreaders, words with auditory-visual confusions…