This paper reviews the literature on grammatical knowledge in language comprehension in the preschool years from the perspective of sensitivity to structural contrasts. Studies of both direct and indirect evidence of sensitivity to structural contrasts were evaluated and showed that there may be a developmental sequence of increasing sensitivity…

Attempts to demonstrate that a complete description of elliptical coordinations can be obtained only if the uses of elliptical and nonelliptical coordinations are investigated also. Future research on elliptical coordinations should be directed towards more full-scale analyses of the genres discussed here and other genres. (31 references) (CK)

This paper reports on a 15-year follow-up of the linguistic and cognitive profile of a woman with standard trisomy 21 (Down syndrome). The follow-up found recent rapid deterioration in receptive and productive language skills. However, basic phonological and morphosyntactic skills are preserved. Her changing profile mirrors that found in aging…

A study investigated whether two speech measures (peak intraoral air pressure (IOP) and IOP duration) obtained during production of intervocalic stops would be altered by the presence or absence of a cochlear implant in five children (ages 7-10). The auditory condition affected peak IOP more than IOP duration. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Four developmentally delayed preschoolers were taught action-object responses in receptive and expressive language modalities, using matrix-training procedures. Acquisition of a word combination rule was facilitated by the use of familiar lexical items, whereas subsequent acquisition of new lexical knowledge was enhanced by couching training in a…

Two five-year-old children with profound hearing impairments were involved in a conditional discrimination task. They were taught to relate manual signs, pictures, and printed words in a nominal matching-to-sample task in such a way that equivalent stimuli resulted. Results showed that the establishment of equivalence relations can promote…

The study investigated two neurophysiologic components of event-related brain potential during auditory and visual target detection tasks with 11 non-retarded autistic children, 9 retarded autistic children, and 16 normal subjects, aged 15-19. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that non-retarded autism involves abnormal attentional and…

Analysis of English-as-a-second-language reading students' (N=68) reading and listening test scores revealed that these two receptive language sub-skills were similar, although listening was the more integrated skill. The sub-skills tended to cumulatively contribute to holistic comprehension of messages. (Author/CB)

Evaluation of 16 college students with dyslexia found no significant differences between listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Comparison of the 16 dyslexic students with 16 nondyslexic students revealed significant differences on reading achievement and reading time but not on untimed reading comprehension. (JDD)

Tested English and Spanish receptive vocabulary of 396 Hispanic preschoolers in Miami. English scores were more than one-and-a-half standard deviations below the mean. The mean score in Spanish was 95 compared to a mean of 100 for the Spanish norming population. Factors other than vocabulary knowledge that might account for the lower scores were…

The communicative abilities of six sets of same-sex, preschool dizygotic twins were examined. In each dyad, one sibling had a strong history of recurrent otitis media (ROM) but the other twin did not. History of ROM was associated with lowered receptive vocabulary, with no consistent effects detected in expressive speech and language tasks.…

Selected discourse behaviors of 10 elementary school children with specific language impairment (SLI) presenting expressive or combined expressive-receptive deficits were compared to each other and to two groups of controls. The two SLI subgroups varied from each other on specific measures of turn taking and cohesion. Research implications are…

A literature review of listening comprehension research covers five areas: text characteristics; interlocutor characteristics; task characteristics (variation in listening purpose); listener characteristics; and process characteristics (variation in the listener's cognitive activities and the nature of the speaker/listener interaction). (Contains…

Discusses the assessment of children's early language comprehension by the use of (1) parent reports; (2) preferential-looking models; and (3) event-related brain potentials. Examines recent findings on dissociations between language comprehension and production in normal, late-talking, and brain-injured children and considers the implications of…

Grammatical development was examined for 10 children (ages 19 to 31 months) with expressive language impairments only and 10 children with both receptive- and expressive-language impairments. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax. However, specific weakness in verb-phrase elaboration…