The last entry in the list of books under review on page 85 was printed incorrectly. It should read as follows: Spiro, R.J., Bruce, B.C., & Brewer, W.F., (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension. Hillsade, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980

This paper presents a critical review of studies designed to teach language production skills to children with specific language impairment. The evidence reviewed suggests that a number of training approaches are effective, often resulting in gains that exceed the rate seen in normal development. Close analysis of children’s post-treatment usage reveals that these gains go beyond rote learning, and may even result in response classes that are different from those seen in the adult linguistic system. The chief limitations in these training studies are that children seem to make use of the target linguistic form only in untrained utterances that share certain topographical features with the utterances used in training, and that there is little evidence that children’s use of the target form will extend to speaking situations that bear little resemblance to the training/testing situation.

Comprehension and strategy use by autistic children were tested in two experiments. Eighteen autistic subjects were compared with thirty normal 3- and 4-year-olds, matched on the PPVT and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. In Experiment I subjects were asked to act out active and passive, biased and reversible sentences. The autistic group's overall comprehension was lower than that of the normal controls; although the autistic subjects did use a word-order strategy, they did not generally use a probable-event strategy. These findings were confirmed in Experiment II, in which the same procedure with anomalous three-word items was used. The results are interpreted as evidence that in autism there is a semantic-cognitive deficit in utilizing conceptual knowledge about relational aspects of the environment and that this deficit underlies the comprehension difficulties of autistic persons.

The relationship between comprehension language training and production language training was examined by teaching 12 adults and 12 children a miniature language. The relationship between the two types of training was determined by examining their effects on the generalization of names. The results indicate that production training generalizes more extensively than comprehension training. The advantages and disadvantages of both types of training are discussed.

This study explores the metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children aged 4–7, who are users of Signed English, with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying metalinguistic abilities that generally increased with age and that were similar to the developmental pattern found in hearing populations. Based upon performance with respect to four factors (i.e., explicit segmentation, omissions of function words, content words, and inflectional morphemes), subjects were grouped into four classes. In Class 1, sentences or groups of words were not segmented. in Class 2, major constituents of the sentences were segmented. In Class 3, major constituents and some function words were segmented. In Class 4, the entire sentence was segmented. Patterns of omissions found throughout the classes for function words and inflectional morphemes are discussed. Also addressed are implicit segmentation skills found to develop prior to the development of explicit abilities.

Cluster Reduction is purported to be a general phonological process applied by misarticulating children to simplify production of the two consonants in a cluster. In this study the generality of the process was explored in six misarticulating children. The children produced errors on all /s/ and /r/ or /l/ clusters in baseline. In a counterbalanced order three children were trained on /s/ clusters first and /r/ or /l/ clusters second in a multiple baseline design; whereas three children received training on /r/ clusters first and /s/ clusters second. Generalization to other forms of /s/ and /r/ or /l/ clusters was tested throughout training. Results showed that with one exception children generalized to within class clusters but not to across class clusters. It was concluded that if cluster error patterns reflect processes, the processes are not general enough to operate across classes, but rather, are confined to the cluster receiving training.

Groups of good and poor readers at second-grade level were tested for comprehension of adjectival constructions of the John is eager/easy to please types and of center-embedded relative clause constructions. The poor readers were inferior to good readers in understanding O-type adjectives (easy) but not S-type (eager). As well, they were poorer at comprehending embedded sentences, but only when the sentences described improbable events, ones which reversed the normal subject/object roles. When either noun could, on pragmatic grounds, assume either role, both groups fared equally well. The results are interpreted as casting doubt on recent assertions that deficient use of a phonetic memory code underlies the syntactic inferiority often seen in poor readers. A more pervasive linguistic immaturity is suggested as being involved.

Experimental studies of autistic children's memory for linguistic materials have yielded what appear to be conflicting results. A review of these studies reveals a pattern of findings consistent with the hypothesis that autistics do, in fact, have a special linguistic coding difficulty. The apparent discrepancies are the result of the use of low-power statistical tests in some experiments. Because the autistic deficit may arise from a failure to use semantic or syntactic knowledge or even from a failure to acquire such knowledge in the first place, future research should be aimed at explicating the precise mechanisms underlying the autistic deficit.

Younger readers, mean age 6;11, and older readers, mean age 8;7, matched on IQ and SES, read 18 consonant phonemes embedded in nonsense CVCs. Results indicated that (a) within groups, younger readers made significantly more errors on digraphs than graphs; (b) younger readers made significantly more errors on graphs in the final position; (c) there was no position effect for either group in reading digraphs. Analysis of errors based on the number of distinctive features shared within stimulus-response pairs revealed that (a) on graphs, both groups made significantly more errors that shared two distinctive features; (b) on digraphs, the majority of errors for younger readers shared one distinctive feature; (c) the predominant strategy on digraphs for both groups was to read one letter. These findings demonstrate that most oral reading errors produced by beginning readers are not random, but rather are systematically related to the stimulus.

Learning disabled children's pragmatic competence was examined on a task which allowed for the separate assessment of linguistic and social knowledge, that is, the ability to appropriately vary politeness and persuasive strategies as a function of listener status. Learning disabled and nondisabled children made requests of four imaginary listeners varying on the dimensions of intimacy and power. Learning disabled girls produced more polite requests than nondisabled girls to all listeners. Learning disabled boys produced a smaller variety of persuasive appeals and fewer appeals which represented sophisticated levels of listener perspective taking. Learning disabled boys' politeness and the elaboration of their persuasive appeals exhibited variations as a function of listener features, but attended to dimensions different from those reflected in nondisabled boys' requests. It appears that learning disabled boys produced less appropriate requesting strategies than nondisabled boys, even though their repertoire of linguistic forms for conveying politeness was not deficient. These results are discussed in terms of the interdependence of the social and linguistic knowledge underlying pragmatic development.

Two hearing children of deaf parents (initially 3;9 and 1;8) had been cared for almost exclusively by their mother, who did not speak or sign to them. Though the older child had heard language from TV and briefly at nursery school, his speech was below age level and structurally idiosyncratic. Intervention led to improvement in his expressive abilities, and by 4;2 the deviant utterance patterns had disappeared. In later years, his spontaneous speech and school performance were normal, though language testing revealed some weak areas. The younger child initially used no speech, but acquired language normally after intervention, with his brother as model. Implications for understanding the role of linguistic input in language development are discussed.

This study explored novel ways of using the media for education, especially second language instruction. Various combinations of visual and auditory presentations of messages were compared, for example, both written script and spoken dialogue in subjects’ first language (L1), or script and/or dialogue in a second laguage (L2), and so on. Subjects were elementary pupils with advanced training in L2. The dialogues of radio programs were transcribed, permitting such combinations as: dialogue in L2, script in L1 (the normal subtitling format); dialogue in L1, script in L2 (reversed subtitling); both dialogue and script in L1 or in L2; and so forth. On L1 and L2 tests of memory, certain combinations (e.g., reversed subtitling) were much more promising for the development or maintenance of second language skills, or for literacy training, than was conventional subtitling. Theoretical and practical inplications are discussed.

The acquisition of /s/ plus stop clusters by language-delayed children was compared with normal acquisition, first, for phonemic substitutions and second, for differential use of voice onset time (VOT) for the substituted stops. Ten children, diagnosed as language delayed, produced 95 percent of the intended clusters as singleton stops; children who could employ VOT contrastively produced most stops, substituting for clusters with VOT values in the long lag range.

Categorical perception of a synthetic /r/-/l/ continuum was investigated with Japanese bilinguals at two levels of English language experience. The inexperienced Japanese group, referred to as Not-experienced, had had little or no previous training in English conversation. The Experienced Japanese group had had intensive training in English conversation by native American-English speakers. The tasks used were absolute identification, AXB discrimination, and oddity discrimination. Results showed classic Categorical perception by an American-English control group. The Not-experienced Japanese showed near-chance performance on all tasks, with performance no better for stimuli that straddled the /r/-/l/ boundary than for stimuli that fell in either category. The Experienced Japanese group, however, perceived /r/ and /l/ categorically. Their identification performance did not differ from the American-English controls, but their overall performance levels on the discrimination tests were somewhat lower than for the Americans. We conclude that native Japanese adults learning English as a second language are capable of Categorical perception of /r/ and /l/. Implications for perceptual training of phonemic contrasts are discussed.

Basic cognitive psychology can provide guidelines for how to design computer systems that are easy for people to use. Prior knowledge of the real world and natural language affect the way people use computers, so computer systems that are consistent with this prior knowledge are easier for people to use. Providing users with mental models for a computer system will allow them to solve more complex problems and understand sequences of commands better. Computer systems should be flexible to accommodate the individual differences between users, but the complexity of understandable computer systems is constrained by the limited information processing capacity of users. The domain of human–computer communication promises to be a fertile domain for applied tests of cognitive theories.

The Communicative Intention Inventory, an observational system for describing children's early gestural, vocal, and verbal communicative behaviors, is presented in this paper. The Inventory is comprised of eight intentional categories which are included because of their content and construct validity, their likelihood of occurrence in a clinical setting, and their high observerscorer reliability. The rank order of frequency of occurrence of the eight intentional categories is compared across 16 subjects resulting in a reliability coefficient of .66. The value of using the Inventory as a criterion-referenced measure of communicative intentions is explored.