The paper reports on a study of the rate of language learning of 12 children aged 2 to 10 with severe to profound bilateral hearing losses. Intended to help deaf children learn spoken language at the same rate as average hearing Ss, the intervention stressed three qualities of linguistic information: (1) clarity, (2) appropriateness, and (3)…

Children with language delays often manifest low rates of self-initiated expressive language, particularly in school settings. Children with mild to moderate language delays appear to develop this pattern as a means of coping with situations in which they believe they are unable to perform or may perform poorly. Interactive language training…

This report presents an evaluation of the third and final year of Project Speak, funded under Part B of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Project Speak was initiated to stimulate the language development of preschool handicapped children through direct instruction and parent training. The program provided home-based language…

This study explored the semantic content of spontaneous speech of 10 children (ages 4-5) during pretend play. More references to family were made during home play and to peers and self during preschool play. Use of daily routines and fantasy/cartoon characters as common play themes was analyzed. Discusses intervention programs for children with…

Sampling spontaneous expressive language through video narration is offered as a means of reducing variability among language samples over time or from different speakers. Advantages include content stability, high interest value, and high processing demands. Disadvantages include brevity of the samples, lack of information on dyadic communication…

Two experiments investigated the effects of peer modeling on the acquisition of receptive and expressive language responses. Experiment 1 studied lexical learning among five children who were mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. Experiment 2 investigated the observational learning of receptive and expressive language responses by two…

This collection of four "focus flyers" developed by the Services for Children with Deaf-Blindness program at the University of Southern Mississippi provides practical guidelines for parents and teachers working with infants, children, and young adults who are deaf-blind. The first flyer is on communication interactions and is organized into an…

A longitudinal study was conducted of 153 children (3-7 years old) with severe and profound hearing losses. Ss were tested three times over a 4-year period, including measures of linguistic and academic performance. In addition, information was collected on the background characteristics of Ss through parent interviews. Among findings were that,…

The connections among language learning, language education, and children's wordplay are explored in this book. Each chapter examines some aspect of the interrelations between wordplay activities and the goals of language education. The book is divided into three sections, with the first section exploring wordplay and language learning in the…

Fifty-seven children, aged 23-28 months, were assessed using the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development, mean length of utterance, and Minnesota Child Development Inventory (MCDI). The MCDI Expressive Language scale was found to be a valid predictor of expressive language. The MCDI Comprehension-Conceptual scale appeared to assess both…

This study evaluated 9 computer-generated measures of children's language production, based on 24 children with specific language impairment and 24 normally developing children, ages 24-50 months. Three measures possessed desirable developmental and diagnostic characteristics: mean syntactic length, total number of words, and number of different…

This study, involving 20 children (ages 4-11) with severe hearing impairments, affirmed the content validity of the Clark-Madison Test of Oral Language as a measure of nonwritten expressive language with hearing-impaired children. Performance comparison with hearing individuals revealed a different profile of strengths and weaknesses than did…

The effects of 2 preschool-based shared-reading interventions were evaluated with 95 children, ages 2- to 5-years, from low-income families. Language skills of the children were below age-level as measured by standardized tests. Children were pretested and randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) no-treatment control, (b) typical shared-reading…

The study observed and compared the pragmatic skills of two mildly retarded and two nonhandicapped kindergarten children, focusing on their use of language in everyday conversational situations. A checklist developed by the investigator was used to record observations based on six categories of speech acts: commenting, answering, affirming,…