Topic continuing and nontopic continuing utterances produced by three productively language-disordered preschoolers were analyzed. Results suggested that Ss produced a proportion of adjacent utterances comparable to proportions previously reported for children with normal production language skills and that they relied on an imitation strategy to…

The author identifies two operations, "dump" and "play", that take place in human communication and analyzes the communication efforts of young children (prior to age 8) in terms of the limitations in cognitive development that govern their communication. (Author/LS)

The study investigated the conversational participation of eight language-impaired children (ages 6-8) in interactions with normal language peers. No significant differences were found between impaired and normal children in number and proportion of topics maintained, topics introduced, or topics shaded. A familiarity effect in Session 2 was also…

Evaluation of questionnaires on the expressive communication skills of 211 individuals with severe mental retardation (including both children and adults in a variety of residential settings) revealed a wide range of communication abilities, with a significantly larger percentage of adults than children communicating at symbolic levels. (Author/DB)

Conversation analysis was used to investigate a conversational partner's strategies when assisting with the word searches of an aphasic person. Analysis of 38 authentic videotaped conversation sequences identified four conversation strategies systematically and collaboratively used: guessing, alternative guessing, completion, and closing…

A study involving 19 children with hearing impairments found that those who developed intelligible speech by 36 months had at 16-23 months a high frequency of vocal utterances, a high proportion of vocal utterances that included intelligible true words, a large consonant inventory, and a high percentage of intonational utterances. (Contains…

Background: Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. Aims: To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and…

The study evaluated narrative production in seven severe to profoundly hearing impaired adolescents in an attempt to determine whether syntactic prowess would predict which subjects would be more adept at narrative production, in terms of the story grammar conventions used, and the cohesive devices used when narrating a story to a naive listener.…

Ten Down's Syndrome children (all 3-4 years old) and four nonhandicapped children and their mothers participated in a study of children's ability to respond to questions. Interactions of each of the 14 mother-child dyads were recorded on videotape and mother-child vocalizations transcribed. The number of appropriate, inappropriate, and…

Conversational competence of 20 learning disabled (LD) second and fourth graders was examined through analysis of videotaped interviews between Ss and their peers. Results indicated that LD Ss were cooperative conversational partners who were able to participate in the reciprocal exchange of turns; however, they were less skilled than nondisabled…

Reported were data concerned with research and development of communications systems for persons with motor handicaps. An experiment on receptive communication which attempted to determine whether tactual information could be acquired simultaneously by several fingers indicated that superior performance resulted when patterns were scanned by one…

Language sample data from normal subjects (ages 40-79) were collected to determine how normal aging might affect performance on a picture description task, routinely used for assessment of aphasic individuals. Only an increase in the number of paraphasias and a decrease in communication efficiency correlated with increased age. (DB)

Results of two experiments involving four severely handicapped preschoolers suggested that Ss could be taught rudimentary communication skills prior to the attainment of J. Piaget's sensorimotor stage 5. It was further suggested that establishment of initial labeling in an elicited training format will not necessarily generalize to either…

A communication program for autistic children (three to six years old) which increased communication skills in the context of establishing reciprocal communication exchanges involving intensive modeling of verbal responses within joint activity routines and reinforcement based on fulfilling the intent of the child's communication. (Author/CL)

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…