The study assessed the oral narrative abilities of 10 normal and 10 learning-disabled (LD) middle school children (11-12 years old). Narratives were assessed using A. Applebee's system for the development of story organization. The narratives were also examined for the specific components used within the stories themselves. Findings revealed…

Third part of a continued article. (SK)

A teacher training coordinator stresses the importance of developing gifted children's communication abilities and briefly describes two group dynamics activities ("Circle Partners" and "Think Pink") for building listening, interpretation and discussion skills. (LH)

Some Spanish nouns designating non-animate things may have either feminine or masculine gender. The reasons given for the choice of gender are many and varied. It is put forward that in some cases the masculine acts as a diminutive and the feminine as an augmentative. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Examines children's strategies in language production. Focuses on how children in early stages of language acquisition talk about objects, spatial relations, and actions, and the extent to which they rely on general purpose terms in all three domains. (JMB)

Discusses the syntactic differences in expressing wishes or desires in Italian and Russian. (CFM)

Described are the purposes of the language story method, a technique designed to develop and expand expressive language in deaf children. (CL)

Discusses a way to introduce students to idioms and figurative expressions while stimulating their interest in literature. (MB)

Revised methods of scoring the Token Test and Reporter's Test were developed to accommodate specific types of errors committed by language-disordered children during a previous standardization study. Test modifications are explained as are the results of administering the revised tests to both normal and language-disordered school-aged children.…

The study examined the expressive communicability (i.e., the amount, fluency, elaboration, clarity, and veracity of voluntarily transmitted information about oneself) and belief systems of 30 hospitalized adult schizophrenics and 30 matched normals. Schizophrenics differed from normals on all measures and the different beliefs predicted expressed…

Common problems in using and scoring the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure to quantify young children's grammatic structure expressive language are reviewed. Scoring examples are provided to help clinicians learn the DDS procedure. (Author/CL)

Principal findings were that pictures of objects with more frequently occurring names were named more rapidly than those with less frequently occurring names; that language-impaired children named pictures less rapidly than chronological-age peers but more rapidly than language-age peers; and effects of frequency of occurrence were comparable for…

Reading disability is conceptualized as a disorder of several aspects of langauage, with acquisition of syntax, phonics, and phonemic coding in short-term memory signficantly delayed. However, semantic processing appears to be relatively intact. Remedial reading programs should stress the encouragement of expressive language skills. (Author/CL)

The study investigated changes in frequency of language used by six Down's syndrome children (six to seven years old) as they interacted with nonretarded peers within a normal school playground setting. As a group, Ss demonstrated a positive relationship between percentage of time engaged in interaction and increasing frequency on language use in…