Parents of 40 Down's Syndrome babies were taught methods of communicative training with their children that involved either modeling techniques or written instructions. Results showed a significant difference in favor of the group taught modeling. (RJC)

Studied the development of speech act comprehension in 36 retarded and 36 nonretarded children at the developmental ages of five, seven, and nine years. Retarded and nonretarded individuals followed the answer obviousness rule and used the contextual and linguistic clues available to respond to yes-no interrogative sentences. (RJC)

A child with chronic otitis media with effusion solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodic cues. Findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input, and linguistic constraints to explain individual variation in language…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

This study examined Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL) of novel vocabulary by 88 primary school-age children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Among normally developing children, results documented a robust ability to learn words in the early school years. Children with SLI demonstrated significantly less word-learning ability…

Examined the relationship between infants' early verbal imitation, when the ability to copy behaviors first emerges, and their lexical development during the second year of life. Twenty infants were examined longitudinally at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Suggests that infants' early imitation of words not in their repertoires predicts and may…

Investigated developmental change in symbolic representational ability by examining infants' imitation of vocalizations, words, visible motor actions, and nonvisible motor behaviors at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Results revealed a pattern of increasing imitation, supporting the view that a domain-independent representational capacity develops…

Data from 48 infants revealed (1) that infants aged 1;2-2;3 failed to establish a stable word-object link even in follow-in labeling and (2) that only infants aged 1;6-1;7 could identify the correct referent during discrepant labeling. During the period between 1;2-1;7 infants are becoming increasingly adept at acquiring new labels under minimal…

Examined three-year-old children's ability to generalize novel words to new instances. Suggested that children's similarity judgments and feature selection in name generalization are guided by nonstrategic attentional processes that are minimally influenced by new conceptual information. Proposed that these findings may explain the extraordinary…

This study describes the vocal development of infants born with very low birth weights (VLBW). Samples of vocalizations were recorded from three groups of infants when they were 8, 12 and 18 months of age: preterm VLBW infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), preterm VLBW infants without BPD, and healthy full-term infants. Infants with BPD…

This study investigated the effect of day care attendance on the receptive and expressive language development of nine 4-year-old children. Five children who had 2 years of day care experience comprised a day care group. A home-reared group was composed of four children who had 3 months of day care experience. Children's receptive language ability…

Developmental changes in the expression of contrast in child discourse were investigated. Contrast is defined as a psychological phenomenon and applied to the domain of discourse topics. The development of the ability to produce utterances that are topically related to the previous conversational turn is considered. Four types and three levels of…

Based on an empirical study of over 3,000 learning disabled children and on a review of research, the paper outlines intellectual, attention and verbal mediation, social-affective, and oral and written characteristics of learning disabled students. Among the findings reported are the following: the median educational retardation is one grade below…

Data on the development of fundamental frequency patterns and the emergence of semantic relations during the "one word period" in child language development are reported in this study. The research focuses on the changes that occur as children progress from producing single words to sequences of single words and finally to producing…

PATTERNS OF THE LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN OF DIFFERENT SOCIOECONOMIC ENVIRONMENTS WERE DETERMINED BY A STUDY OF WORD ASSOCIATIONS. THE RELATION OF RESIDENTIAL AREA, SOCIAL CLASS, OR SUBCULTURAL GROUP MEMBERSHIP TO LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT WAS THE MAIN CONCERN OF THE STUDY. EACH MEMBERSHIP GROUP WAS FURTHER CATEGORIZED ACCORDING TO IQ LEVEL,…