The acquisition of words referring to three types of actions was examined in normally developing and language-impaired children using a nonsense word paradigm. Fourteen language-normal and 10 language-impaired children whose speech was limited to single-word utterances served as subjects. The children were presented with 12 experimental words in 5 sessions over a period of approximately 3 weeks. The experimental words referred to actions that were classified as intransitive, transitive and specific to a particular object, or transitive but performed on 4 different objects. The children in both groups produced few of the action words. However, the groups differed in their comprehension of the three action word types. Specifically, the language-impaired children did not exhibit differences in comprehension across the different types of actions. The language-normal children, however, comprehended fewer words for intransitive actions than for the other types. The implications of these findings for characterizations of early lexical acquisition and for the nature of specific language impairment are addressed.

The relation between reading comprehension and linguistic awareness is discussed in terms of a set of processing skills common to both these activities. Two metalinguistic skill components are identified and examined for their relative contribution to reading comprehension. The general hypothesis is that these skill components explain a significant portion of the variance in reading comprehension. The two skill components are operationalized in terms of a battery of metalinguistic tasks, each of which is claimed (by means of task analysis) to rely primarily on one or the other processing component for its solution. A study is reported in which 8-year-old children are tested with these metalinguistic tasks, general measures of intelligence, and a test of reading comprehension. The results show that the relation among performance on the metalinguistic tasks is strongest for those tasks relying on the same processing skill component and that one of these components is most significant in determining the child's level of reading comprehension. These findings are interpreted in terms of the underlying linguistic processes involved in reading.

The relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness was explored in Puerto Rican Spanish- and English-speaking children. All subjects were from low-income backgrounds and were enrolled in a transitional bilingual education program in the United States. Two longitudinal studies were conducted. The first study examined the abilities to note and correct ungrammatical sentences in Spanish. Subjects were 104 children in first and second grade at the beginning of the study. They were followed over a period of 2 years. The second study looked at the ability to detect ambiguity in sentences, and to paraphrase the different meanings. There were 107 subjects who were in fourth and fifth grades, and were also followed over a 2-year period. The results from both studies indicated that native language proficiency as well as the degree of bilingualism affected metalinguistic awareness. The results also indicated that these effects interacted with the types of items in the metalinguistic tasks. This suggests that both subject-specific and task-specific factors are important in understanding the relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness.

The relation between speech perception and reading ability was investigated. Identification and discrimination tests with stimuli on a stop consonant place of articulation continuum (/PA/-/IA/) were presented to various groups of good and poor readers (normal first graders on a reading continuum in Study 1, moderately and severely dyslexic and high- and low-achieving normal children in Study 2). In both studies, reading-related perception differences were especially marked in a comparison of actual and predicted (from identification test) discrimination scores, suggesting that the poor readers have special difficulty with a discrimination-specific task demand. In Study 3, reading-group differences still show up if the stimulus pairs of the discrimination test are simply to be repeated (eliminating the similarity judgment factors), and are also very pronounced on a nonspeech discrimination test (with 130 ms pure tones of slightly different frequencies). In Studies 1 and 3 identification slope and phoneme boundary differences between reader groups were found as well. Though these results do not definitely prove the auditory perception hypothesis, they support it. The conditions that should be satisfied by auditory perception tasks in future reading acquisition research are briefly discussed.

A longitudinal study was conducted of the effect of mothers' communication mode on the language development of 149 children with severe and profound hearing losses. The relationship of several subject and family characteristics to mode selection was also investigated. The children were between 3 and 5 years of age at the commencement of the 4-year study. Mothers' mode was coded from videotapes of structured and semistructured interactions. Findings indicated that children whose mothers used oral communication had higher scores on measures of spoken language, whereas children whose mothers used manual communication had higher scores on measures of receptive language and mother-child communication. Within the oral group, children whose mothers made extensive use of gestures had lower scores than children whose mothers did not. Within the manual group, children receiving limited sign input had lower scores on most measures than children receiving extensive input.