Relative contributions of form and function information to concepts of 10 objects were investigated with first, second, and third-grade subjects. For first graders, function information about objects took precedence. For second and third graders, form information took precedence. (Author/GSK)

Details typical charges against expressivist rhetorics, while sketching a version of expressivism underwritten by the principles and procedures of ordinary language philosophy. Suggests that the teaching and learning practices that emerge from this analysis compete with the vague, sometimes grandiose ambitions of expressivist practitioners as they…

Noncomprehension signaling by 16 school-age children with mild mental retardation was compared with performance of 16 typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age. Message type and speaker were manipulated in a direction-following task. Message type, not speaker, influenced noncomprehension signaling, with no intergroup…

Performance of 32 children with language impairment and 22 without, on perception and imitation of synthesized syllables, found that phoneme perception ability of children with only expressive impairment fell between that of controls and expressive-receptive impaired children. Both groups of subjects had difficulty with phonological memory, but…

Discusses how the child, the classroom teacher, and the language specialist can work together in the context of the classroom to help children with significant identified expressive language difficulties. Discusses developing metacommunicative awareness in whole-class lessons, small group discussions, and individual conferences. (SR)

Sixteen students (ages 11-17) with profound hearing impairment, assessed as having either good or poor speech intelligibility, were asked to describe pictures and to respond to a series of clarification requests. Significant differences emerged in repair strategies used by the two groups and in comparison with normal hearing peers despite similar…

Describes a follow-up study of 25 boys who had been diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Delay (SELD) at 24 to 30 months of age. At three to four years, half of the boys continued to exhibit poor expressive language skills, suggesting that young children diagnosed with SELD are at considerable risk for continuing language problems. (33…

Story retelling in which the child retells a story he has read has been used to effectively assess and improve reading comprehension, knowledge of story schema, and communication skills in elementary students with hearing impairments at the Kendall Demonstration Elementary School in Washington, D.C. (DB)

An analysis of syntactic complexity was performed on spontaneously generated oral stories obtained from 93 learning disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students at age levels from 8 through 13 years. Results indicated almost identical rates of correct usage and similar patterns of usage between LD and NA subjects on all measures. (Author/DB)

The connected discourse tracking technique was adapted to an auditory story modeling procedure with two four- to five-year-old children with moderately-severe hearing losses. Over four academic quarters, the two children's word per minute scores increased substantially demonstrating the feasibility of this task for children in this age range. (DB)

The study found that activities designed to improve the elaboration and/or retrieval of words with two language-impaired children (ages 9 and 10) showed definite effects with the greatest gains associated with activities focusing on both elaboration and retrieval. (Author/DB)

Expressive-language-delayed (ELD) families were substantially similar to families with normal younger children and different from families with normal older children in their pragmatic interactions. Mothers' mean length of utterance did not differ among the groups. Pragmatic language interactions in the ELD families were determined largely by…

This study, with 19 young children (36-76 months old) with developmental delays, in the first stage of language learning, found that the children used more frequent language and more diverse vocabulary in routine than in nonroutine situations. The protocol for parent identification of routines is appended. (DB)

Communication repair behaviors of 10 children with mental retardation (ages 11-13) and 10 mental age-matched children without mental retardation were examined. The children with mental retardation did not respond as often and rarely used details to expand their utterances. Results have implications for the development of conversational skills in…

This study examined discourse cohesion in young normal (n=8), specifically language-impaired (n=8), or autistic (n=10) children (ages 3-7). Results showed all three groups used the same cohesion strategies with similar patterning. Significant group differences were found in the overall rate of correct use and in the use of individual cohesive…