The relation between physical identity and name identity encoding speed was assessed in 32 mentally retarded adults and nonretarded controls. A difference between retarded and nonretarded subjects in preparation time was apparent; however, this difference did not influence encoding speed. (Author/DB)

Twenty-one aphasic and seven nonaphasic adults participated in a referential communication task. Both aphasic and nonaphasic subjects successfully determined essential information to be communicated and communicated it to a listener. Nonaphasic and nonfluent aphasic subjects were more efficient in communicating information than mixed or anomic…

In a study of 50 normal children and 65 children with expressive language disorder (ELD), results showed no differences in the frequency, duration, or timing of episodes of otitis media. For children with ELD, there was a relationship between otitis media and expressive language improvement. (BC)

Investigation of the impact of speaking rate variations in the linguistic input provided to 32 school-age children (half with specific language impairment (SLI) found both SLI and typical children had similar recognition accuracy, but SLI children had significantly more difficulty with the production of novel words presented at a fast rate.…

The purpose of this cross-sectional study, conducted with a random sample of 166 students with emotional disturbance (ED), was to establish, with attention to age and gender differences, the extent to which students with ED served in public school settings experience language skill deficits. This study also examined particular types of problem…

Language impairment is a primary characteristic of children with autism; however, findings on the language deficits of these children have been inconclusive, and even less is known about the language profiles of Chinese-speaking children with autism. The present study examined the verbal expression-comprehension abilities of 46 Chinese children at…

This study examined progress after 1 year of treatment for children with autism who received a mean of 36 hours per week one-to-one University of California at Los Angeles Applied Behavior Analysis (UCLA ABA) treatment. Two types of service provision were compared: an intensive clinic based treatment model with all treatment personnel (N = 23),…

After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of…

Book reading has been demonstrated to promote vocabulary. The current study was conducted to examine the added value of an interactive shared book reading format that emphasizes active as opposed to noninteractive participation by the child. Studies that included a dialogic reading intervention group and a reading-as-usual control group, and that…

Background: Narratives have been used by a number of researchers to investigate the language of children with specific language impairment (SLI). While a number of explanations for SLI have been proposed, there is now mounting evidence that children with SLI have limited memory resources. Phonological memory has been the focus of the research on…

Four experiments were conducted to assess the roles of politeness and humor in the asymmetry of affect observed in verbal irony production. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated different replies (ironic, literal, or "no response") made to hypothetical scenarios for their politeness and humor, respectively. Participants in Experiment 3 were…

Measures of language sample length (in c-units) and morphological, syntactic, and narrative abilities were obtained from oral narrative transcripts of 22 children who stutter and 22 children who do not stutter; participants attended kindergarten, first, and second grades. A two-way MANOVA yielded significant main effects for grade, with…

Defines and evaluates the consequences brought about by the increase of Americanisms in the Spanish language. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

Analyzes the history and etymology of the Spanish idiom "al buen tuntun." (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

The study compared the effectiveness of peer and adult models in teaching an expressive language task to four autistic boys (9-11 years old). Ss had well developed imitative repertoires and some spontaneous language. Using a BCBC design, counterbalanced across modeling conditions and replicated across Ss, autistic Ss were taught to respond to…