The primary objective was to compare the grammatical output of children with language disorders on different tasks. Sixty-five children with language disorders, aged six to eleven, completed the syntactic formulation (elicitation) and narrative subtests from the Assessment of Comprehension and Expression 6-11 (Adams et al. 2001). Grammatical…

While there has been much interest in the differences between oral and written language styles, studies have focused on the relative use of certain features. Little attention has been paid to the cultural value given to language style in languages with a literary tradition versus value given to style in those with a non-literary traditions. All…

Two experiments investigated preschoolers' acquisition of spatial words in Mandarin Chinese. In one experiment, 5 groups of 10 children at 34, 39, 46, 52, and 57 months were tested for comprehension and production of 14 pairs of Chinese spatial words. In the comprehension test the children were asked to point to pictures corresponding to the words…

Based on a literature review and analysis of teaching methods and objectives, it is proposed that the emphasis on communicative competence ascendant in French foreign language instruction is closely related to, and borrows from, expressive techniques taught in French native language instruction in the 1960s. (MSE)

Selective mutism (SM) is a rare and complex disorder associated with anxiety symptoms and speech-language deficits; however, the nature of these language deficits has not been studied systematically. A novel cross-disciplinary assessment protocol was used to assess anxiety and nonverbal cognitive, receptive language, and expressive narrative…

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of…

This study originates in concern over the apparent fact that many secondary school students learn to dislike literature while studying works of literature in their English classes. The study eventuates in a behavioristic theory of literature; literature is described in terms of the meaning-making activities in which the reader engages rather than…

Nine children suffering from Landau-Kleffner (L-K) syndrome and 25 children with developmental expressive disorders were tested for comprehension of English grammatical structures in spoken, written, and signed language modalities. L-K children demonstrated comprehension problems in all three language modalities and tended to treat language as…

Children who used chloride-deficient soy-based infant formulas (Neo-Mull-Soy and Cho-Free) have been found to exhibit expressive language disorders. Medical studies of such children are reviewed, and a case study compares the language development deficits of an eight-year-old boy who used the formula with that of his fraternal twin who did not.…

Previous research on typically developing children has shown that their memory for events depends on how they are encoded. As children grow older, they start to mention causal and temporal relationships between events, including psychological causes. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) were studied to disentangle the effects of…

In a study of the differences in male and female descriptions of nine photographs, picture type was found to be an important variable. Twelve male and 8 female college students were asked to describe each of the photographs. Picture type was rated as high in interest to males, high in interest to females, or high in interest to both. Responses…

Seven aphasic and seven normal adults described cartoon drawings and received one of three types of feedback (explicit, false, or implicit). Subjects' recodings showed that normal subjects used more expansion and deletion than aphasics. No significant differences existed between groups for repetition or revision. Subjects' responses varied…

A two-year-old child and an eight-year-old bonobo exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy were asked to respond to novel sentences. Both subjects comprehended novel requests and simple syntactic devices. The bonobo decoded the syntactic device of word recursion more accurately than the child; the child performed better than the bonobo…

Longitudinally compared the production of syllable shapes in 10-minute spontaneous speech samples of 20 children with expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E) and 15 typically developing (TD) peers from 24 to 36 months of age. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Children and adolescents with Down syndrome show an emerging profile of speech and language characteristics that is typical of the syndrome (Chapman & Hesketh, 2000; Chapman, 2003; Abbeduto & Chapman, 2005) and different from typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age, including expressive language deficits relative to…