Ten Down's Syndrome children (all 3-4 years old) and four nonhandicapped children and their mothers participated in a study of children's ability to respond to questions. Interactions of each of the 14 mother-child dyads were recorded on videotape and mother-child vocalizations transcribed. The number of appropriate, inappropriate, and…

The purpose of the study was to assess the reliability and the validity of the Ski Hi Language Development Scale which was designed to determine the receptive and the expressive language levels of hearing impaired children from birth to age 5. The reliability of the instrument was estimated through: (1) internal consistency, (2) inter-rater…

Conversational competence of 20 learning disabled (LD) second and fourth graders was examined through analysis of videotaped interviews between Ss and their peers. Results indicated that LD Ss were cooperative conversational partners who were able to participate in the reciprocal exchange of turns; however, they were less skilled than nondisabled…

This pamphlet is the ninth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet describes a project that was undertaken to discover…

This manual describes the Caregiver Language Observation Instrument, a device useful for observing the language behavior of caregivers in infant day care settings. Eleven categories of language behavior are recorded: approval, disapproval, cautioning, soothing, talking to, questioning, labeling, elaborating, singing, directing, and imitating. The…

Reported were data concerned with research and development of communications systems for persons with motor handicaps. An experiment on receptive communication which attempted to determine whether tactual information could be acquired simultaneously by several fingers indicated that superior performance resulted when patterns were scanned by one…

Idiomatic expressions in American English provide an important clue to the speaker's values and attitudes, many of which are represented in bipolar language (e.g., "warm hearted"-"cold blooded,""walking on air"-"feeling low"). Most bipolar idiomatic continua which predict meaning also reveal positive and negative evaluations connected with…

The study describes the Shewan Spontaneous Language Analysis (SSLA), establishes its reliability and validity, and reports on its use with 47 aphasic adults who had suffered a single unilateral occlusive cerebral vascular accident two to four weeks prior to testing and 30 normal adults. (Author/DB)

Language sample data from normal subjects (ages 40-79) were collected to determine how normal aging might affect performance on a picture description task, routinely used for assessment of aphasic individuals. Only an increase in the number of paraphasias and a decrease in communication efficiency correlated with increased age. (DB)

Performance of 15 language-impaired children (average age eight years) on a referential communication task requiring verbal encoding of novel referents was compared to performance of normally developing age-mates and language-mates. Subjects used known referent, graphic, and mixed strategies about equally with language-impaired children less…

Compared the performance of 56 children on the 11 subscales of the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Children's Revision. Results revealed significant differences on Receptive Speech and Expressive Language subscales, suggesting a possible differential sensitivity of the children's Luria-Nebraska to verbal and nonverbal cognitive deficits.…