This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: facilitation of language development in disadvantaged preschool children; auditory-visual discrimination skills, language performance, and development of manual gestures in young children; language used to describe females; functional communication competence in children; comparison of the speech of preschool urban, lower class black children with that of white middle class children; spoken English of Mexican-American kindergarten children; language processing and memory; home verbal environments of verbally handicapped children; a comparison of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar and B.F. Skinner's theory of verbal behavior; high school students' reactions to taboo words; children's use of superlative adectives and figurative language; the relationship between family configuration and cognitive and language abilities of preschool children; the concept comprehension of normal children with deviant syntactic development; and support of language development. (GW)