Purpose: This study examined whether any of a series of segmental and whole-word measures of articulatory competence captured more of the variance in impressionistic ratings of severity of involvement in speech delay. It also examined whether knowing the age of the child affected severity ratings. Method: Ten very experienced speech-language…

In this study, the authors compared the phonological accuracy and patterns of sound change of boys with fragile X syndrome, boys with Down syndrome, and typically developing mental-age-matched boys. Participants were 50 boys with fragile X syndrome, ages 3 to 14 years; 32 boys with Down syndrome, ages 4 to 13 years; and 33 typically developing…

Toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared on three global measures of phonological behavior to age-mates with normal speech development. The measures were the average level of complexity of syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

This newsletter issue contains four articles all addressing aspects of intervention with infants and toddlers having communication disorders. The first, "Assessing the Communication of Infants and Toddlers: Integrating a Socioemotional Perspective" (Barry M. Prizant and Amy M. Wetherby) describes a new instrument, the Communication and Symbolic…

Smith (1973), Stampe (1972), and Braine (1973) believe that by the time the child speaks his perception is well-developed, and that any discrepancy between child forms and adult forms are due to organizational and production difficulties. Other linguists believe immature perception determines the form of child speech. This paper suggests that…

The main service of this project involves early identification of underdeveloped or abnormal behavior characteristics in the preschool-age child and the initiation of an educational treatment plan which ameliorate the developmental problem. Identification of disabled children is made by the two project diagnosticians in nursery schools and Head…

This paper is concerned with the Aristotelian notion of "universal" as applied to phonological phenomena. It is claimed that speech production in children and adults, in normal and deviant speakers, and in a variety of languages, can all be described according to the same universal phonological rules which constitute the universal process of…

This case study describes an intervention program with a 20-month-old hearing child with deaf parents. The child was diagnosed as having a significant delay in both spoken and sign language. A home-based intervention program resulted in the child's increased use of sign and spoken vocabulary and the mother's improved interaction style. (Author/DB)

This study found that naturalistic conversation training improved the spontaneous speech production of two children (ages three and four) with speech production disabilities. (Author/DB)

The efficacy of screening two-year-old children for language delay using a parent report questionnaire was investigated in three related studies. Parents' reports of children's expressive vocabulary size was highly correlated with clinical language measures at age two, but somewhat less accurate at predicting developmental status a year later. (DB)

The social/behavioral characteristics of 63 preschool children with low and high language abilities were observed for 60 min during teacher-directed structured activities and 60 min during child-directed unstructured activities in Head Start classrooms. Children with low language were observed to have significantly higher rates of disruptive…

Purpose: Guided reading is a common practice recommended for children in the early stages of literacy development. While experts agree that oral reading facilitates literacy skills, controversy exists concerning which corrective feedback strategies are most effective. The purpose of this study was to compare feedback procedures stemming from 2…

This paper describes a method of language intervention, Structured Methods in Language Education (SMILE), used with students having severe language disabilities due to such factors as autistic disorder, central auditory dysfunction, impaired hearing, or mental handicap. SMILE develops a hierarchy of skills leading from phonology to morphology to…

This is a report of a New York City school district educational project funded under Title l of the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 which provided a supplementary reading and mathematics readiness program for early childhood CRMD pupils ranging in age from five to seven. The major goal of the program was to increase the levels of student…

This paper discusses Lee and Canter's procedure for assessing child language development as an example of how psycholinguistics is beginning to enter the language clinic. The procedure includes recording and transcribing examples of children's sentences, then scoring them to yield a Developmental Sentence Score (DDS). This procedure was compared…