Describes the Narrative Assessment Profile, a comprehensive discourse-analysis measure for evaluating topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, referencing, conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. Clinical implications for the assessment and intervention of narrative discourse in school-age children are discussed. (Author/DB)

The listener-adapted communication strategies of 40 educable mentally impaired and 40 nonmentally retarded children were investigated. The results revealed that age, listener, and group differences were evident as a function of the specific task the children were required to perform. (Author/CL)

Play was the only behavior that distinguished among six nonverbal pragmatic behaviors for three groups: 20 language impaired Ss (mean age 4 years) and two control groups equated with the experimental Ss by age and mean length of utterance. No significant differences were observed for distance, physical contact, vocalization, looking, and smiling.…

The paper presents a symptom approach for the intervention of childhood language disorders. Intervention guidelines are presented in the following areas of functioning: two-word utterances, auxiliaries, grammatical structures, auditory comprehension, discourse, and symbolic play. Behavioral analysis, rather than etiological classification, forms…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

The Screening Kit of Language Development (SKOLD) was designed to meet the following criteria: validity for 2.5 - 4-year-old children, standardization for speakers of standard and Black English, and appropriateness for paraprofessional screeners. This paper describes the development, content, administration, scoring, reliability, and validity of…

Decisions based on the Fluharty Preschool Screening Tests and the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test (and their subtests) were compared to a validity criterion of passing or failing the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development for 182 children aged 36-47 months. Validity differences were found that depended on test and subtest content.…

In speech therapy lessons, discourse between the clinician and the child is impacted by the social presuppositions of both participants. This paper argues that some macroanalysis of the clinician's social experiences must be incorporated into the microanalysis of therapy to sort out the multiple meanings of therapy events. (Author/JDD)