This case study examined prosodic use in a normally developing child between the ages of 20 and 46 months. Conversational repairs were elicited to examine prosodic stress. Fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of syllables were measured. Although the subject could repair stress errors, a clear pattern of the development of acoustic cues…

This paper considers methodological issues related to the independent variable in early intervention research. Three standards are proposed: (1) use theory to guide research; (2) provide operational definitions of independent variables, quantify them, and describe how they relate to theory; and (3) measure treatment fidelity. Three levels of…

Types of utterances (with locative action utterances specifically differentiated) were evaluated in a language-impaired child tracked between one year, six months and three years of age. Comparison with utterances in other children suggests the importance of such a fine-grained analysis in detecting semantic properties of child language…

This study examined the relationship between productive phonological knowledge and generalization learning patterns in nine phonologically disordered children (ages three to five). Although all subjects exhibited equivalent levels of knowledge and received identical training, three different generalization learning patterns were observed.…

Evaluation of the speech perception of eight children (ages four and five) with specific language impairments and documented morphological difficulties found these children to be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions (typical of English grammatical…

This study of eight growth-retarded children with Down's syndrome (aged 1 to 6.5 years) found that administration of growth hormone was more effective than either L-dopa or clonidine. Results suggest that children with Down's syndrome have both anatomical and biochemical hypothalamic derangements resulting in decreased growth hormone secretion and…

This study examined possible influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance with eight 5-year-old children and eight young adults using the spatiotemporal index (STI), a measure of stability of lip movement over phrase repetitions. The STI was significantly higher in the complex sentence condition and for the younger…

Fifty-seven children (ages 5-8) with and without specific language impairment (SLI) participated in judgment and elicitation tasks designed to evaluate their understanding of irregular verb forms. Differences between SLI and control children were observed in their productions and relative levels of sensitivity to infinitive errors in finite…

This study examined the understanding of others' intentions in 21/2- to 5-year-old children with autism and a control group of children with other developmental delays. No significant between-group differences were found, although within-group patterns suggested that children with autism may have a slightly less complex understanding of others'…

This study evaluated recorded performances of 84 children of whom 22 had persistent stuttering. Although initially the persistent stuttering group had significantly poorer phonological skills, assessment after 1 and 2 years found no differences indicating faster phonological improvement for the persistent stuttering group. Results raise questions…

This study extended the study of specific language impairments (SLI) to two non-mainstream dialects: a rural version of Southern African American English and a rural version of Southern White English using language samples from 93 4- to 6-year-olds in Louisiana. Findings indicated the surface characteristics of SLI manifested in the two dialects…

This study explored the relationship between sentence disruptions and the length and complexity of sentences spoken by 26 typical children developing grammar. For most children, disrupted sentences tended to be longer and more complex than fluent sentences and the magnitude of the differences in length and complexity was positively correlated with…

The study of children?s peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in interest in peer relationships, significant gaps remain. In this article, we focus on a particularly…

The affective relationship between six male and one female preschool-aged autistic children and their parents was studied by employing a method enabling systematic analysis of parent/child interaction. Children ranged in age from 3 years, 7 months to 6 years, 4 months. Through use of the Bank Interaction Coding System (BICS), behaviorial sequences…

This study tests the hypothesis that men's and women's psychological commitment to parenting and work exerts an influence on their expectations for and perceptions of their children's behavior. Subjects were 104 fathers and 194 mothers, each with a preschool child, who were employed in a wide range of occupations. Data were collected by means of…