This study investigated whether shared parent-infant book reading at 4 and 8 months would be associated with subsequent language abilities at 12 and 16 months. Parents of 87 typically developing middle-class infants reported on the presence or absence of shared reading in the home; infant language abilities were measured through laboratory…

Background: Empirical research suggests that social disadvantage has a negative effect on the development of language, and related cognitive skills such as reading. There is, however, no corresponding body of research on the impact of social disadvantage on motor development. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of…

Purpose: To provide the first detailed information about native language abilities of children who are or had been institutionalized. Method: The language of ten 30-month-old children raised in Romanian orphanages was compared with that of 30 chronological-age-matched peers: 10 children who had moved recently from orphanages to foster care, 10…

Researchers and educators have developed an interest in language development. Their studies focused on the cultural context in which language is learned and developed and its relationship to cognitive development. This article reviews the researchers' definitions on oracy and its social facets of language learning. Specifically, it reviews studies…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

The paper reviews research on the choice discrimination program, a method of teaching receptive language to severely handicapped children. The writer's own work using this method is compared to previous research, and he suggests that the approach may be useful with other groups. (CL)

Two norm-referenced tests--Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language (TACL) and Preschool Language Scale (PLS) and one criterion-referenced task, the Basic Two-Choice Object Discrimination Task--were administered to nine severely handicapped preschoolers. Overall, performance and behavioral ratings tended to be best for the Two-Choice Task and…

The relationship between the use of concrete objects and pictorial representations of those objects when teaching noun labels to 3 autistic boys was analyzed. Although results indicated no consistent functional relationship between the two types of stimulus presentation, there were varying degrees of generalization between the two conditions.…

Suggests that the growth of receptive language functioning in very young children is a crucial developmental area and summarizes some major issues involved in attempting to learn more about it. Portions of this text were included in an invited presentation at the 1969 Conference on Research and Teaching of Infant Development, Merrill-Palmer…

Two experiments, with about five autistic children (two to 14 years old) in each experiment, assessed the effects of autistic immediate echolalia on acquisition and generalization of receptive labeling tasks. These results indicated that echolalia faciliated generalization for echolalic autistic children but not for functionally mute autistic…

Seventeen Down's Syndrome (DS) children (9-12 years old) scored significantly lower than retarded non-DS and nonretarded students on arts of the Token Test for Children requiring sequential or syntactic processing. Ss showed no deficits in tasks requiring spatial/simultaneous processing. Results suggested a possible right-hemisphere dominance for…

This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

Cognitive and language skills of 39 siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) and 39 siblings of typically developing children (SIBS-TD) at ages 4, 14, 24, 36, and 54 months were compared. Twelve of the 39 SIBS-A revealed a delay in cognition and/or language (including one child diagnosed with autism) compared to only two SIBS-TD. Developmental…

Purpose: This study tests the hypothesis that toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) will show differences from contrast groups in preferences for attending to speech. Method: This study examined auditory preferences in toddlers with ASD and matched groups of (a) typical age-mates, (b) age-mates with nonautistic developmental disabilities,…

The study investigated receptive and expressive language skills in 11 preschool gifted children. It was concluded that as a group the gifted Ss did not have a better selection of deep structure and transformation rules than normal Ss. (SB)