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…

Presents data that challenge the view that the omission of functional categories by children with specific language impairment is a manifestation of the same immaturity characterizing the grammar of young children without impairment. Data include atypically high omissions or even almost total absence of determiners in the speech productions of a…

A follow-up study examined cognitive and motor development in 52 children prenatally exposed to cocaine (ages 48-64 months) and 52 typical children. Results found that the children who were prenatally exposed to cocaine continued to exhibit problems in expressive and receptive language areas. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

A study examined cognitive and motor development in 56 toddlers prenatally exposed to cocaine (ages 12-27 months) and 56 typical toddlers. Infants prenatally exposed to cocaine experienced developmental problems in expressive and receptive language areas. In addition, there was a possible relationship between cocaine exposure and subsequent…

Background: Parents and professionals can both play a role in improving children's expressive language development and a number of alternative models of delivery exist that involve different levels of input by these two groups. However, these alternative treatments have not been subject to rigorous comparative analysis in terms of both cost and…

Purpose: To scale language milestones in a group of 527 children to provide an instrument for screening language development. Procedure: The questionnaire regarding these milestones was completed by parental report. It was evaluated whether the scaled milestones satisfied the assumptions of the Mokken item response model. Results: The scalability…

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…

Designed to accompany a slide and tape package, this booklet outlines the role parents can take in children's language development. Following an introduction which familiarizes parents with the concepts of receptive language (comprehension of spoken language) and expressive language (the information a person is trying to communicate and the form…

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,…

A pilot course has been developed to improve ability in spoken, receptive and nonverbal communications for visually handicapped senior high school students. (LH)

The STRIVE Program, an approach to identifying and serving culturally diverse (Black and Hispanic) gifted students, is described. The STRIVE model consists of six modules: gifted programing; receptive and expressive language training; counseling (individual and group); relevant curriculum providing transitory skills; a parent advisory board; and…

A transfer of stimulus control procedure was used to teach a 14-year-old retarded deaf girl manual signing skills. (CL)

A program for teaching relational vocabulary in classroom settings has three receptive steps for identifying the target word and three expressive steps for using the target word. These methods focus on the systematic modification of both example presentation (including non-defining characteristics and situational distractions) and response…

The study analyzed communication performance of tenth grade learning disabled (LD) students (N=1,098) on the Florida State Student Assessment Test-II (a minimum competency test). LD students demonstrated better literal communication skills and poorer interpretive and written communication skills. Employers (N=240) also supported the importance of…

The study examined the expressive language, receptive language, and articulation skills of 30 Spanish speaking Puerto Rican children (ages 5-12 years) with language disorders (identified by fluent Spanish speaking evaluators). Results indicated both structural and pragmatic difficulties with little impact of English on their language development.…