Accessing children's knowledge of sociolinguistic rules for speech therapy lessons.

Eight dyads of misarticulating school children (M = 7:9 years) enrolled in clinical programs were videotaped while they role-played 5-min remedial articulation lessons. Analysis of lesson transcripts was carried out at selected levels (lesson management, roles, discourse contexts, communicative acts, discourse sequences, and topic introduction). The "clinicians" controlled the lesson tasks and topics and used communicative acts in a manner typical of adult clinicians. The "clients" role-played cooperatively and displayed the response patterns of children receiving remedial lessons. Hierarchical relationships among the selected levels of analysis suggested the use of a cohesive register appropriate for clinical teaching. It is suggested that children's sociolinguistic perspectives on remedial speech and language lessons should be taken into account when intervention lessons are planned and implemented.

Phonological constraints on the sentence productions of language-disordered children.

Effects of phonological and syntactic structure on the sentence productions of language-disordered school children (mean age = 6:2 years) were investigated. The syllabic complexity of target sentences as well as clause embedding significantly contributed to sentence inaccuracy (omission, substitution, addition, and transposition errors). Phonological complexity in lexical items disrupted syntactic performance in a quantitative fashion. Whereas the syntactic constructions determined the patterns of errors, added phonological complexity simply increased the errors within the patterns. The causal interrelationships between children's syntactic and phonological disorders are discussed in terms of a theory of general organizational deficit.

Perception of iconicity in American sign language by hearing and deaf subjects.

Three groups of subjects differing in age, language experience, and familiarity with American Sign Language were compared on three tasks regarding the perception of iconicity in signs from American Sign Language. Subjects were asked to guess the meaning of signs, to rate signs for iconicity, and to state connections between signs and their meaning in English. Results showed that hearing college students, deaf adults, and hearing first-grade children perform similarly on tasks regarding iconicity. Results suggest a psycholinguistic definition of iconicity based on association values, rather than physical resemblances between signs and real-world referents.

Three dimensional view of sign iconicity.

The data suggest that learners' backgrounds are influential in determining which signs will be most easily perceived as iconic, which means that iconicity should not be determined solely on a linguistic basis.

Mimicry versus imitative modeling: facilitating sentence production in the speech of the retarded.

Two methods of language instruction administered to mentally retarded subjects at the two-word stage of language development were investigated. Subjects of the mimicry training group imitated Agent-Action-Object (AAO) constructions immediately after presentation, while subjects of the imitative modeling group first heard the AAO presentation and later produced the AAO construction in response to a verb question. Imitative modeling subjects achieved as many correct AAO responses during training and more correct responses on a generalization task and in a free play setting. They also displayed more novel response behavior (selective imitations) and spontaneously corrected productions. The results support the use of modeling procedures for inducing language production in the retarded.

Syntactic and phonological influences on children's articulation.

The effects of syntactic and phonological structure on the consonant articulations of children with phonological deficits were investigated. Three structural variables were studied: syntactic structure (noun phrase, declarative sentence and passive sentence), work structure (monosyllable and disyllable) and word position (initial and final). Syntactic structure and word structure significantly affected the accuracy of articulation and the degree of word simplification. Structural complexity may contribute to overall hierarchial complexity, in turn causing children to simplify their speech.

Syntax influences the accuracy of consonant production in language-disordered children.

Nine children with restricted syntactic and phonological development repeated 20 target consonants embbedded in noun phrase, simple declarative, and passive structures to determine the influence of syntactic complexity on accuracy of consonant production. The children made significantly more errors in the sentence contexts than in the noun phrase context. This was found for both early-developing and late-developing consonants. However, the ratio of the number of distinctive feature modifications to the number of consonant errors showed that segmental errors were not produced as less exact approximations of the target consonants. Instead, the children simply made more errors of a predictable type, suggesting that the effect of syntax on accuracy of consonant production is quantitative rather than qualitative.

Developmental transformational capacity of children with Down's syndrome.

This study examined the generative-transformational capacities of two groups of children with Down's Syndrome with mean mental ages of 3,6 yr. and 4,6 yr. respectively. A sentence repetition task was used to assess their knowledge of selected transformational sentence types (simple-active-affirmative-declarative, question, negative, passive and negative-passive). There were significant effects of groups and sentence types but a nonsignificant interaction of groups X sentence types. These results were taken as support for Lenneberg's "slow motion" hypothesis of language development in mentally retarded children. Children with Down's Syndrome appear to follow the same patterns of grammatical acquisition as normal children but at a reduced rate associated with the severity of their retardation.

Self and mutual speech comprehension by deviant- and normal-speaking children.

This study was conducted to determine whether deviant-speaking children can understand their own speech productions when these productions are presented to them from an external source (tape recorder). Two groups of children with normal and deviant speech attempted to comprehend their own and one another's recorded repetitions of two matched lists of imperative sentences. Although there was a significant main effect for comprehension of high- and low-intelligibility sentences, a significant main effect for the groups' comprehension performances was not found. The results suggested that the deviant-speaking children were perceptually oriented to the standard code of the speech community rather than to their own deviant speech codes. Deficits in speech production are discussed in terms of a reduction theory of telegraphic speech. Deviant-speaking children may reduce complexity of speech output through the application of phonetic reduction rules.

In search of a language intervention lexicon.

An analysis of the syntactic, semantic and phonological features of a corpus of therapy words drawn form recent publications dealing with remedial language instruction was performed to determine whether these words would in theory support full grammatical acquisition. Percentage of occurrence data were compared with distributional statiscs for adult (Berger, 1967a) and child (Weir, 1962) usage. The results suggested a bias in favor of concrete words referring to everyday objects around the home, nouns, verbs and adjectives, and morphemes of simple syllable and sound structure. In general the words analyzed appeared more suitable for children under 3 years of age than for older children. Of factors guiding the clinician's selection of therapy words, native speaker intuition for distributional characteristics of the language was regarded as the major factor of judgment.