This study investigates the use of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules assumed to underlie phonetic spelling errors. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and adult literacy students did two spelling tasks employing real words and nonwords respectively. Good and poor readers were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Two of these were relatively “ambiguous” and the real-word task investigated the effect of ambiguity as a function of reading skill. While good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, ambiguity had a similar effect on good and poor readers. Nonword results indicate that poor readers can employ phoneme-grapheme correspondences more than is expected from their real-word spelling error patterns.

This inquiry examined strategies used by young children when receiver feedback indicated that their gestural communicative attempts were not understood. The children were grouped according to their vocabulary sizes and number of coding rules for two-word utterances. The results indicated that the children, although capable of semantically equivalent verbal behavior, tended to persist in the use of a gesture when experiencing communicative failure. The gestural persistance was not found to be related to the children's lexical or syntactic abilities. It was concluded that the children may not have realized that a verbal behavior can serve as a replacement or an adjunct to a gestural communication.

This paper examines the voicing contrast for word-initial obstruents in a child whose functional misarticulation initially was characterized by a severe lack of contrasts normally used in the English language. Specifically, auditory analysis indicated that the child represented a large number of both voiced and voiceless obstruents with [d]. Acoustic analysis demonstrated, however, that the child was producing an obstruent voicing distinction, albeit one that was not generally perceptible to listeners. Following a therapy program, the child produced an acceptable voicing distinction, at least for stops. The importance of these findings is that 1) they seem to indicate that the child is attaining articulation skills in a delayed, and not deviant fashion, and 2) they illustrate the utility of acoustic analyses in refining phonological descriptions.

Cognitive, academic, first language, and second language abilities of language impaired children attending French immersion programs were assessed in kindergarten and in grade 1. After two years of instruction in a second language the linguistic and cognitive skills of these children were similar to a comparable group of language impaired children who were educated in their first language. The language impaired children were also acquiring proficiency in second language skills, although not to the same levels of proficiency as French immersion children with normal first language abilities. The results are discussed in light of current theories of optimal language of instruction.

This paper examines various rendering techniques and emphasizes the unique contribution that computer technology offers to transcription. First, the basic manual transcription procedure and its grounds are discussed. Next, three methods of generating transcripts are considered separately: (a) completely manual preparation; (b) a combination of manual and computer procedures; and (c) the on-line processing/monitoring by computer. Finally, the relative advantages and limitations of these techniques are discussed in terms of a trade-off between several factors which include initial investment in equipment, person hours, cost of copying and modifying transcripts, and reduction of errors in transcribing data.