Language delayed children need systematic instruction, experience with a range of language functions, and opportunities for spontaneous speech. (DD)

A dichotic word task was used to contrast the speech-perceptual functioning of 29 Down's syndrome children having either good or poor speech and language skills to that of nonretarded Ss. (Author)

Gestural joint attention behaviors, personal pronoun use, and spontaneous communicative behavior were compared in 11 autistic children and 11 children with developmental language delay (DLD). DLD children responded correctly to joint attention interactions more often and their spontaneous gestural behavior was more communicative and…

Minimum language skills for kindergarten success are described and defined as "school readiness language." A school-readiness-language checklist gives a procedure for documenting a child's level of language skill. Specific techniques are presented to remedy documented gaps within the context of the kindergarten classroom. (Author)

Five conditions for sampling the continuous speech of 12 speech-delayed children were defined and compared. Conditions differed on variables associated with examiner behavior and stimulus materials. General findings of few significant differences associated with sampling conditions support the validity of continous speech sampling for phonologic…

Structural and functional features of productive language of 15 healthy and 30 at-risk two-year-olds were compared. Although premature and physically handicapped toddlers did not differ significantly from each other, both groups were delayed in a variety of structural indices of productive language. On functional features of language usage,…

A total of 192 high-risk infants and 85 full-term healthy newborn infants were administered the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. A principal component analysis was performed separately for the high-risk and control infants. Results suggest that the high-risk infant is similar to the normal infant in behavioral development, especially when…

Synthesized speech stimuli with slowed-down critical formant cues were easier for 24 children with delayed language to discriminate. Further training with extended duration stimuli did generalize to stimuli of normal durations. (Author/CM)

Although the language delayed and normal speaking children showed equivalent linguisitic sophistication (as measured by mean length of utterance), the language delayed children's control of the acoustic-phonetic details of the voicing contrast was less mature than that of the normal speaking children. (Author/PHR)

Investigated the effects of peer reinforcement and various clinician reinforcement schedules on the imitation accuracy of language-delayed children in small treatment groups. (SJL)

Two case reports of 4 and 5 year old children describe the rationale and procedures for structuring an articulation therapy program on the basis of distinctive feature analysis of the child's articulation problems. (Author/DB)

Describes a study investigating the effects of second language learning on voice onset time (VOT) values in production of word initial stop consonants. Production of Spanish and English words by two native Spanish speaking siblings, one delayed in the acquisition of Spanish and both learning English, was compared. (Author/MES)

Two related experiments with two speech-handicapped children (three and four years old) examined generalization across contexts involving different sentence forms when selected grammatical features were trained within a single syntactic context. (Author)

Two repeated-measures designs with two samples of speech delayed preschool children (N=18) compared learning activities utilizing microcomputer instruction with similar activities delivered via conventional tabletop instructional materials. Findings suggested both methods are equally effective and efficient with each being more effective with…