The article details on three classroom projects using computers and synthesized speech software to foster expressive language and facilitate language comprehension in severely visually handicapped preschoolers and in preschool- and school-age Downs syndrome children. Computer use with a cerebral palsied child for story comprehension and…

This paper examines the importance of hands for the person who is deafblind, reviews hand development, and identifies specific teaching skills that facilitate hand development and expressiveness in persons who are deafblind. It notes that the hands of a deafblind individual serve not only as tools but also as sense organs (to compensate for their…

This paper examines the importance of hands for the person who is deafblind, reviews hand development, and identifies specific teaching skills that facilitate hand development and expressiveness in persons who are deafblind. It notes that the hands of a deafblind individual serve not only as tools but also as sense organs (to compensate for their…

This study explored effects of training 25 mothers to administer focused intervention to teach specific target words to their toddlers with expressive vocabulary delays. Following treatment, mothers' language input was slower, less complex, and more focused. The children used more target words, more words during play, and had larger vocabularies…

A study compared intelligibility and speech rate differences following speaker implementation of 3 strategies (topic, alphabet, and combined topic and alphabet supplementation) and a habitual speech control condition for 5 speakers with severe dysarthria. Combined cues and alphabet cues yielded significantly higher intelligibility scores and…

A study examined the relationship between parent word familiarity and the language development of pediatric cochlear implant users (ages 3- 8). Thirty-two parents rated their familiarity with 150 words. Results indicated a significant relationship between parents' ratings and children's receptive vocabulary and language abilities, as well as their…

Compared to 19 controls, 21 dyslexic boys, age 11-18, were as successful in naming parts of objects in drawings, and they had no distinctive difficulty over homophones or homographs. However, subjects did produce more distortions of words, examples of inappropriate usage, incomplete sentences, repetitions, and other errors. (Author/JDD)

Describes the components, course objectives, texts and materials, and structure and assignment of The American University's translation course, which hones students' foreign language competence through its focus on the short-term goal of attention to subtleties of meaning in the foreign language and nuance of expression in English. (CB)

The findings from research on written and oral summarization are discussed under three headings: summarizers' strategies, improving summarizers' performance, and the assessment of summary quality. Objective measures of summary quality used by researchers are described, and ways these measures could be adapted for use in higher education assessment…

Ten individuals (ages 14-51) with autism participated in 6 experimental facilitated communication sessions, 2 with no help, 2 with partial assistance, and 2 with full assistance. Within each session, the facilitator had knowledge of the experimental stimuli on half of the trials. Results revealed no cases of correct responding independent of…

The impact of a disordered phonological system (expressive or receptive) on language development is examined. Research results and guidelines are presented for identification of critical intelligibility and phonological awareness deficiencies and for intervention. Options for expediting intelligibility gains and research findings on enhancing…

Middle school students (n=39) with learning disabilities completed written and oral science composition tasks. Results indicated better overall oral than written performance, use of more sentences (though shorter) in written than oral presentations, and no significant differences between oral and written word count or thought units. Little…

This study explored the conflict resolution ability of 30 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 30 children with normal language (NL) in grades 3 through 7. Children with SLI suggested fewer types of strategies to resolve hypothetical conflicts than their NL peers. The groups did not differ in the number of strategy types used in…

Public school speech-language clinicians (n=266) in California were surveyed regarding methods for assessing the language of children ages 4-9. Results are discussed in terms of formal and informal expressive and receptive language assessment and ways in which new assessment tools are identified and incorporated. (Author/JDD)

The performance of 20 children with educable mental retardation (ages 8 to 12) and 20 verbal mental age-matched nonretarded controls was compared on identifying emotional facial expressions and producing the equivalent word adjectives. There were no significant differences between the two groups in general, despite the fact that children with…