Relationships between pretend play and word production were investigated in 10 hearing toddlers and 10 toddlers with hearing loss who attended an auditory/oral early intervention program. Results showed significantly higher levels of pretend play for the hearing children and an association between level of pretend play and word production for the…

Narrative attainment was assessed in 76 four-year-old children at risk for brain injury because of histories of early corrective heart surgery. Despite considerable heterogeneity in narrative performance, children with early corrective heart surgery produced fewer narrative components than typically developing children. Implications for clinical…

In this article, the authors examined the genetic and environmental factors influencing expressive language development in a sample of 386 toddler twin pairs participating in the Wisconsin Twin Project. Expressive language was assessed using 2 measures from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories-Short Form: Total Vocabulary and…

Children with Down syndrome often display speech-comprehensibility and grammatical deficits beyond what would be predicted based upon general mental age. Historically, speech-comprehensibility has often been treated using traditional articulation therapy and oral-motor training so there may be little or no coordination of grammatical and…

This study examined prior qualitative differences in the process of the emergence of verb use in two sisters when they were each 12 to 24 months of age (the older sister is 2 years and 9 months older than the younger sister). Daily diaries on both children were kept by the mother, who noted emergent structure and vocabulary. Systematic Analysis of…

Teaching Research Initial Expressive Language Program (developed by H. Sloane, et al.) is a structured language program for moderately and severely handicapped preschool children. (Author/PHR)

Effects of receptive vs. expressive training of category labels on acquisition of generalized referential labels by six prelinguistic severely mentally retarded children (5-19 years old) were investigated. Data indicated that receptive training resulted in more accurate generalization to novel category members than did expressive training.…

Data on speech, language, performance IQ, school placement, and behavior are presented on 18 subjects diagnosed in childhood as "aphasic" and followed through adolescence. Results revealed slow but steady growth in language with expressive skills showing more rapid progress than comprehension. Performance IQ was highly correlated with language…

The construct validity of the Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale (REEL) was investigated with 60 mentally retarded children (1-3 years old). Results indicated that REEL language ages were generally consistent with samples of communicative behavior and were also related significantly to indices of children's cognitive functioning.…

Urges teachers to leave an expressive domain for the young child's writing, in which the audience is the young child. (DD)

A parent diary was used as part of an assessment of a 26-month-old severe-to-profoundly hearing-impaired child's expressive language. The diary data, which is appended, were used to obtain information about the child's expressive vocabulary, mean length of utterance, and verbal, semantic, and pragmatic performances. (Author/SEW)

Modeling, prompting, token reinforcement and praise were used to increase the verbal behavior of a 5 year old expressive aphasic child in a speech therapy room setting. Followup data indicated that a frequncy of three word sentences was maintained without further intervention procedures. (Author)

Offers resolutions to the paradox of infants' ability to abstract patterns over specific items and toddlers' lack of ability to generalize patterns over specific English words/constructions. Argues that contradictions are rooted in differing methodologies and stimuli content. Suggests that the patterns infants extract from linguistic input are not…

Phonological neighborhood analyses of tow children's expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighborhood size was calculated as the proportion of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for vocabulary size differences. Analyses…

This study examined the relationship between fast mapping and word learning and between comprehension and production of new words with 30 young children with specific language impairment (SLI). Results suggest that children with SLI may need to hear a new word twice as many times as other children before comprehending and independently using the…