A System is Presented for coding and analyzing dialogue that involves preschool-age children. In the System, each participant is seen, throughout the course of a dialogue, to assume the roles of both initiator and responder. Each role is evaluated according to different scales. As initiator, a speaker's utterances are judged for their level of cognitive complexity and for their “summoning power” (i.e., for their explicitness of a demand for a response). As responder, a speaker's utterances and behaviors are judged for their appropriateness as responses to the speaker-initiator's preceding verbalizations. In assessing dialogue, the scales are interlinked so as to permit one to assess the extent and complexity of the verbal communication that is taking place between the two members of a dyad. The application of the scales is illustrated through the analysis of dialogues recorded between six mothers and their 3-year-old daughters.

Two language intervention methods were compared on their effectiveness at improving syntactic structures as measured by gain scores on the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) procedure. Forty-one expressive language delayed children were assigned to either an Interactive approach (n = 25) or a Programmed approach (n = 16), following a series of 13 pre-training diagnostic tests. An analysis of group mean DSS gain scores did not indicate a significant difference between the two teaching methods. However, when individual differences on the pre-training tests were incorporated into further group comparisons, disordinal Aptitude × Treatment interactions occurred for measures of intelligence, initial syntax level, and visual-motor integration. The Interactive approach optimized syntax improvement for children with relatively high pre-training scores on each of the three measures, whereas the Programmed approach resulted in superior syntax performance for low-scoring children.

Development of plural and past tense morphological rules was examined longitudinally with 272 English-speaking children enrolled in French immersion or traditional English curricula. Children were tested in grades one through four on 18 items from Berko's test (1958). There were no performance differences between the two curriculum groups, girls performed better than boys, and there were correlations between intelligence and performance. Syllables requiring the plural /-z/ and past tense /-d/ and /-t/ were acquired earlier than those calling for /-∂z/ or /-∂d/. Inflection acquisition was orderly and sequential within subjects. By age 10 children began using adultlike irregular formations, but regular or overregularized forms preceded irregulars. Whereas basic rules were mastered by 10 years, more difficult forms were still developing.

American 5-year-olds and adults learned to label various spatial relationships using four Japanese locatives that coincided or partially overlapped in meaning with the locative prepositions into, onto, out of, and off.

Subjects' generalization of the Japanese words was pre- and post-tested to determine if locatives that were semantically (and to a small extent phonemically) similar to their English equivalents would yield better transfer than terms that deviated in meaning and phonemic structure from English. Results confirmed for children only that generalization was differentially affected following lexical training. Adults generalized all four Japanese words with equal accuracy and showed significantly better transfer than children on all but one locative.

Lexical interference initially accounted for many adult and child substitution errors, but did not explain child errors on the post-test. Findings did not agree with predictions that semanticphonemic differences between English and Japanese locatives would adversely affect transfer of the Japanese lexicon to novel exemplars of these terms. Results did confirm, however, that adults learned the Japanese lexicon faster and better than the 5-year-olds.

It has been stated that the study of aphasia tells us little or nothing about normal language. On the other hand, it is commonplace to consider that slips of the tongue do. In this paper I show that many kinds of aphasic errors demonstrate precisely what slips in normals do. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to consider that the study of aphasia can indeed shed light on normal language processes as well as aphasic processes and can be handled in a framework designed to account for slips of the tongue in normal speakers. Similar “editing” mechanisms are needed for explaining the structure of errors produced by both aphasics and normals. Finally, it is suggested that this approach can help us further understand what is not abnormal in aphasia in general, as well as highlight the ways in which distinct types of aphasic “slips” can characterize different syndromes. Consequently, we will have gained additional information regarding the nature of aphasia itself.