Comparisons of age and test score correlations, comparisons of cross-sequential means, and trends of means for diagnostic subgroups and normal controls suggest developmental delay for all measured skills at all ages for autistic and schizophrenic children. Findings also suggest a trend for steady prepubertal cognitive skill development, followed…

A study with three- and five-year olds contrasted two important proposals regarding children's assumptions about word meanings: the taxonomic assumption proposal and the shape bias proposal. Results suggest that perceptual similarity, particularly shape similarity, is very important in early word meaning but that children gradually shift their…

The early linguistic environment of normal infants and children is discussed and research is applied to children who have severe and profound handicaps. (BD)

Ostensive definitions of words are ambiguities as to their referent. In a study of infant-mother dyads engaged in looking at picture books, 95 percent of ostensive definitions referred to the whole object depicted rather than parts, attributes, or actions. When parts were named, ambiguity was avoided by naming the part and the whole. (PJM)

Research is reviewed regarding cluttering (a speech language disorder typified by problems of fluency, articulation, receptive and expressive language, and perceptual motor skills), and the concept is advanced that cluttering is a syndrome of learning disability symptoms. (CL)

The magnitude of the dichotic right-ear advantage was assessed in 48 normal and 48 learning-disabled children representing an age range of approximately five years. (MP)

Comparison of the mental status of 30 subjects with Down's Syndrome mosaicism and 30 matched subjects with trisomy 21 Down's Syndrome found that the mean intelligent quotient of the mosaic Down's Syndrome group was significantly higher and that this group showed better verbal abilities and more normal visual-perceptual skills. (Author/DB)

Two studies investigated how flexible children are when asked to switch from one semantic interpretation to another. Three distinctly different standards for the adjectives "big" and "little" were examined: normative, perceptual, and functional. The first study looked at whether some standards are harder than others to represent and whether…

FIFTEEN RESEARCH STUDIES IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT ARE SURVEYED. PARTICULAR EMPHASIS IS GIVEN TO FELDMAN WHO RECOMMENDS A "CODE-FIRST" PROGRAM FOR BEGINNING READING. THE TERM "CODE" REFERS TO THE LETTER SYMBOLS REPRESENTING THE CHARACTERISTIC SPEECH SOUNDS OF ENGLISH. SOME OF THE PROBLEMS IN PERCEPTION AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR…

This study explored three aspects of the 2-month-old's perception of multisyllabic utterances. Questions addressed were: (1) Do infants perceive phonetic contrasts occurring either in the initial (Bada-Gada) or medial (Daba-Daga) positions of multisyllabic utterances; (2) Are infants more likely to perceive these contrasts in stressed as opposed…

A dichotic word task was used to contrast the speech-perceptual functioning of 29 Down's syndrome children having either good or poor speech and language skills to that of nonretarded Ss. (Author)

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

Describes a study designed to compare color-name with shape-name learning by three-year-old children in an experimentally controlled format. Results show that children learned color-label associates significantly more slowly than matched shape-label associates, and they committed more errors with colors than with shapes during learning. Provides a…

The article reviews existing clinical tests of speech perception, describes behaviorally defined procedures for assessing the skill in normal and language disordered children, and notes the need for a more cohesive framework for the development of speech perception. (CL)

Comparison of 384 male and 91 female autistic children (three through eight years old) revealed that females as a group scored less well on intelligence tests. Boys also performed better than girls on eye-hand integration and perceptual tasks. Predictions of female superiority in affect and receptive vocabulary were not supported. (CL)