Background: Receptive language impairment (RLI) is one of the most significant indicators of negative sequelae for children with speech and language disorders. Despite this, relatively little is known about the most effective treatments for these children in the primary school period. Aims: To explore the relationship between the reported practice…

Background: Many school-age children with language impairments are enrolled in mainstream schools and receive indirect language therapy, but there have been, to the authors' knowledge, no previous controlled studies comparing the outcomes and costs of direct and indirect intervention delivered by qualified therapists and therapy assistants, and…

Presents definitions, sources, forms, early uses, and present uses of proverbs, emphasizing the rhetorical value of proverbs in presenting and preserving ethical values. (DD)

Analysis of the reinforcing value of verbally presented stories for autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children (total N=32) suggested that mentally retarded (but not autistic) children could use prosodic cues in expressive language and that linguistic stimuli had less reinforcement value for autistic and mentally retarded children than for…

The article describes an approach to aphasia description and intervention based on analysis of speech pauses and hesitations. The concepts of pause, planning, and paraphasia (a language production error involving substitution or replacement) are distinguished. Three case studies illustrate application of the technique. (DB)

Cohesion strategies used by three normal and three head-injured adults were examined in both conversational and narrative conditions. Head-injured subjects used different cohesion patterns than normal adults in both conditions; and both groups used different cohesion patterns in the conversational and narrative conditions. (Author/DB)

Measures designed to explore word-finding ability were administered to 60 8- to 11-year-old learning-disabled and normal-learning children. Three stimulus contexts and high- and low-frequency words were used. Certain substitution types and secondary characteristics emerged as specific to learning-disabled children. (Author/SW)

The study investigated the referential communication ability of 40 learning disabled and 40 nonlearning disabled elementary school boys (ages 9 to 11). Results indicated that learning disabled Ss were less effective in providing descriptive information about objects than their nondisabled peers. (PHR)

Presents four computational interpretations of the Gricean conversational maxims in the generation of referring expressions: (1) full brevity interpretation; (2) greedy heuristic interpretation; (3) local brevity interpretation; and (4) incremental interpretation. Examines problems involved in generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate…

This study examined the syntactic characteristics of the speech of adolescent subjects with Asperger syndrome (N=14) or high functioning autism (N=13) using a modified version of syntactic analysis, Brief Syntactic Analysis. Asperger syndrome subjects tended to show more complex speech patterns and longer sentences than did subjects with high…

Comparison of rapid automatized naming in 136 children and youth with primary language disorders and 2,450 typical children and youth found naming time (but not accuracy) differed significantly between groups, especially in the color-shape naming task. Findings indicate that the requirements for two-dimensional, continuous naming resulted in…

This review of the importance of rapid automatized naming (RAN) as a predictor of reading competence reports on its centrality in the double deficit hypothesis and recent research suggesting that RAN taps both visual-verbal (language domain) and processing speed (executive domain) contributions to reading. (Contains extensive references.)…

The mechanisms through which socioeconomic status (SES) influences three-year-old expressive and receptive language abilities were examined in a sample of 1016 families from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that maternal sensitivity and cognitive stimulation were significant…

Research examined construct meaning and validity for two new measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary for Spanish-speaking kindergarteners learning English. Substantive validity and generalizability of score meaning was assessed by examining correlations between an established measure (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-PPVT) and new measures…