Describes Discussion Development Group (DDG) resource center and its experiential learning program designed to assist teachers in leading discussion. Describes imagery as important methodological program feature and its use as indicator of communication at its deepest level. (Author/CM)

The paper presents a model for teaching written language to hearing impaired students on which curriculum can be based. In addition, activities, techniques, and resources are suggested that can be used when implementing the writing program. (Author/PB)

The article describes a series of 10 games designed to improve the communication skills of pupils with severe learning difficulties. The games encourage attention development, initiating comments, and giving and receiving instructions. (DB)

This study compared the conversational repair strategies employed by eight language-impaired children, aged 7-11, and their linguistically normal age- and language-matched peers. All of the subjects appeared to recognize the obligatory nature of the neutral clarification requests employed, though performance differences were noted relating to…

This study tested the validity of facilitated communication with 2 students (ages 10 and 12) with autism, using a picture identification task, video task, and object identification. Subjects were able to report information unknown to the facilitator in one out of four controlled sessions. Strong evidence for direct cuing between subject and…

Examination of the profiles and developmental trajectories of adaptive behavior of 80 children with Down's syndrome indicated a significant weakness in communication skills (especially expressive language), relative to daily living and socialization skills. Children ages 1-6 showed significant age-related gains in adaptive functioning, but older…

This paper describes changes in speech production of deaf children with either cochlear implants (CI), tactile aids, or hearing aids. More accurate production of speech sounds was found for the CI group. The CI group was more accurate on less-visible place features, complex manner features such as glides and fricatives, and some voicing features.…

A time delay procedure was used to teach three children (ages 5-9) with autism to ask the question "What's that?" when novel stimuli were presented, and generalization of the skill was assessed. Results suggest that children with autism can be taught to ask questions that lead to acquisition of new information. (Author/DB)

A story format and discourse analysis procedure was used to evaluate the spoken language skills of 20 elementary students with learning disabilities over a 1-year period. Stories from memory were longer and characterized by more as well as different types of errors than were stories from pictures or stories based on games. (Author/DB)

This study found that the speech of mothers (n=28) of toddlers slow to acquire expressive language tended to differ only in the frequency of use of lexical contingency devices (specifically expansion and extension of child speech), when compared to mothers of normally speaking toddlers. (Author/DB)

Twenty-eight toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates and found to show delayed rather than deviant development in the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

Examination of 23 4-year-old children classified otitis media negative or positive during their first year of life indicated that otitis positive children required a more advantageous signal-to-competition ratio for sentence intelligibility, compared to otitis-negative peers. No intergroup differences were found in receptive or expressive language…

The frequency and types of questions that 4 hearing mothers used with their deaf daughters (ages 3-4) were examined. Results indicated that these mothers used fewer questions than hearing mothers of hearing children, but the types of questions were similar. Child's mean length of utterance influenced the amount and types of questions mothers used.…

A third-grade classroom participated in a communication skills unit (CSU) designed and implemented collaboratively by a teacher, speech-language pathologist, and student speech-language pathologist. The CSU aimed to increase the students' metapragmatic awareness of explanation adequacy. Students showed significant improvement in ability to rate…

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…