The primary purpose of this study was to provide preliminary validity evidence for a 140-item form of the Vocabulary Size Test, which is designed to measure written receptive knowledge of the first 14,000 words of English. Nineteen native speakers of English and 178 native speakers of Japanese participated in the study. Analyses based on the Rasch…

The study investigated cerebral organization for visual language processing with 14 adult stutterers. Results showed the right hemisphere was superior for analyzing the concrete words while the left hemisphere was responsible for processing the abstract items suggesting some form of linguistic competition between the two hemispheres of this…

The study with 10 autistic children (ages 4-17) found that those children with poor receptive language skills produced significantly more echolalic utterances than those children whose receptive skills were more age-appropriate. (Author/DB)

Investigation of the impact of speaking rate variations in the linguistic input provided to 32 school-age children (half with specific language impairment (SLI) found both SLI and typical children had similar recognition accuracy, but SLI children had significantly more difficulty with the production of novel words presented at a fast rate.…

The study with 10 agrammatic aphasic (Broca) adults examined their difficulties using determiners in sentence comprehension. Results included the findings that printed rather than spoken presentation yielded significant improvement for the proper noun/common noun distinction, and that performance was poorer for the mass noun/count noun…

This study compared comprehension of idioms in 66 children comprising 3 groups: normal 9 year olds, 9-year-old children with mild mental retardation, and younger normal children matched with the retarded children for receptive vocabulary age. Although the normal nine year olds comprehended the most idioms, the mentally retarded children performed…

The concurrent and predictive relations of sensorimotor behavior and play to language in the second year were assessed among 19 preterm and 20 full-term infants tested at 13 1/2 and 22 months of age. Numerous associations between play and language were identified; sensorimotor behavior and language in the same age period were relatively loosely…

The study examined the effects of forward time gating (in which incremented portions of a word are presented) and word length on monosyllabic isolated word-recognition performance with 20 female college undergraduates. Listeners recognized time-gated words less frequently and with less confidence, and word length significantly influenced…

Analysis of conversations of 15 adults with autism and 17 with developmental receptive language disorders in childhood indicated that the autistic adults showed greater pragmatic impairment because of their greater difficulty in forming context-relevant communicative intentions. Pragmatic impairments arising from failures in translating intentions…

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

The study examined the ability of five deaf-blind subjects to receive fingerspelled materials through the tactual sense, and of six deaf subjects to receive fingerspelling through the visual sense. Results found highly accurate tactual reception at normal rates and suggested that rates for visual reception are limited by the rate of manual…

Comparison of the receptive vocabulary of 24 undergraduate college students with hearing loss to that of 24 peers with normal hearing found that approximately three-fourths of those with hearing loss performed poorly. Vocabulary skills were not found to be associated with degree of hearing loss. (DB)

The speech perception abilities of 27 children (ages 6-8, 15 with specific language impairment (SLI)) were compared using natural and synthetic versions of speech stimuli. Previously reported findings were replicated for the synthetic speech but not natural speech. Use of inflectional morphology in obligatory contexts by children with SLI was not…

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…

This study investigated the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception as processed by children with mild to severe hearing impairments. Results suggested that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level (thus normally distracting) but that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped…