This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) psycholinguistic abilities in American Sioux Indian children; (2) cohesion in verbals of scientific and technical English; (3) teacher-child discourse interactions and the language of preschool hearing impaired children; (4) acquisition of word meaning by children with and without learning disability; (5) children's knowledge of advanced phonics rules; (6) variation in language use patterns across different group settings in two bilingual second grade classrooms; (7) effects of divorce and the consequent absence of one parent on the language development of nursery school children; (8) selected relationships between linguistic processing skills and reading; (9) metalinguistic awareness revealed in the classroom literacy learning discourse of culturally diverse first grade students; and (10) family literacy and the social context of learning to read and write. (RL)