This study examined the imitation, comprehension, and production of twelve morphological features by groups of deaf subjects who were instructed through manually coded English. Their performances were compared with those of hearing subjects and also with their own follow-up scores from three years later. Results showed early deficits in the English skills of deaf subjects but steady improvement of scores on all tasks over time. Initially, subjects’ age predicted only imitation performance while time in an MCE program predicted production performance in addition to imitation. But neither age nor time in program was a significant predictor of any performance at the time of follow-up. Implications for intervention with manual English codes are discussed.

Communicative behaviors used in encoding new information were examined. Eighteen learning disabled/language impaired (LD/LI) children were compared with two matched groups of normally developing children: age-mates and language-mates. Behaviors studied included measures of communicative effectiveness, communicative efficiency, verbal output, and referential strategies. LD/LI children did not differ significantly from age-mates. However, they did significantly outperform language-mates. Deficient lexicon and deficient comparison activity hypotheses are discussed in light of the results.

This research was designed to explore whether maintenance of the ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions requires specific linguistic/perceptual experience, or whether broadened but nonrelevant linguistic experience can result in generalized perceptual flexibility. To explore this question, bilingual and trilingual adult subjects were compared to monolingual English adults on their ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions that are not used in (any of) their native language(s). Results suggest that broadened, nonspecific linguistic experience does not contribute to increased perceptual flexibility.