This preliminary study investigated the potential of using a dynamic approach to assessing expressive word mapping. Because measuring word mapping with productive language responses is much more difficult than measuring receptive word mapping, incorporating a dynamic measure allowed us to tap partial mapping and provided useful information on word…

How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critical importance in accomplishing this…

Purpose: The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the variability and predictors of expressive vocabulary development in children with autism and very delayed language. Method: This study involved 35 children with autism whose initial chronological ages were between 20 and 71 months and whose initial expressive vocabularies were less…

This study examined the moderating effect of low birth weight on the effectiveness of an early intervention program to improve cognitive, language and behavioral outcomes for children prenatally exposed to cocaine. Participants included 293 primarily minority, low SES children who were enrolled in the intervention during their first year and…

Obscenity and profanity may be defined synonymously as making public that which is private through the use of words which society considers taboo. Obscenity can be classified in three general ways: religious profanity, excretory profanity, and sexual profanity (i.e., copulative terms, genitalia terms, and sexual irregularities). The purposes of…

Discusses the personal value of reading, its ability to provide excitement and adventure and to touch the reader's emotions. (DD)

Speech production/articulation was examined in 20 reading disordered children and 20 control subjects (mean age for all subjects of 14 years). The reading disordered subjects made significantly more speech production errors than normal subjects on all tasks, suggesting underlying deficits in phonological processing. (Author/DB)

Presents an "expose" of academic jargon that often confuses educators and other readers. The terms are humorously defined to reveal the money and status struggles that protect academics from "unhealthy preoccupation" with teaching and scholarship. (CJH)

The study analyzed the temporal delays and pauses associated with neologisms produced by Finnish posterior aphasics. Delays and pauses appeared to correlate with the type of neology they preceded. (Author)

The oral expressive language of 47 aphasic subjects (who had suffered a single unilateral occlusive cerebral vascular accident two to four weeks prior to original testing) was measured on two occasions a year apart. Results found positive changes toward normal language functioning for several variables with type of aphasia affecting outcome on…

Aphasic (N=15) and non-brain-damaged adults listened to and retold two narrative stories three times in succession. Both aphasic and non-brain-damaged subjects were affected by story structure and increased the amount of information retold across retellings. Non-brain-damaged subjects retold slightly more (statistically insignificant) information…

Five profoundly deaf adults were recorded reading lists of individual words under three expressive modes (speech alone, speech and signs, and speech with cues). Results indicated that speech with cues produced the highest level of intelligibility, speech and signs the lowest. (Author/CL)

In a study of the use of grammatical morphemes by 10 hearing-impaired children (5-15 years old) and 10 normal-hearing children matched on the basis of mean length of utterance, results revealed no significant differences in correct grammatical morphemes used and identical order of acquisition for both groups. (Author/CL)

Based on a neurolinguistic model of naming, naming and reading tests were administered to a longitudinal sample of 115 kindergarteners before, during, and after reading acquisition. Preliminary trends indicate that poor readers are significantly different from average readers on all naming tests except those emphasizing receptive vocabulary…

The study compared several discourse characteristics of six linguistically normal and six language-disordered kindergarten children. While neither the linguistically normal nor the language-disordered groups had achieved an adult level of competence, normal children were much more aware of the interactive nature of discourse than…