Ten 7-8-year-old children with specific language impairment participated in a 6-week program of narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) in an effort to evaluate NBLI's feasibility. Each intervention session targeted story content as well as story and sentence form using story retell and generation tasks. Eight children achieved the clinically significant improvement criterion from pre- and posttest comparisons of at least 1.45 points on a narrative quality (NQ) rating (p<.013). Throughout the NBLI program, the children were informally observed to show increased self-confidence in their narrative production skills. Nearly all children preferred story generation activities over story retell tasks, while story retell tasks were favored over sentence imitation drills. Pre- and posttest comparisons for number of different words, developmental sentence score, and a sentence imitation task were nonsignificant. This indicated no further evidence of positive outcomes for NBLI. Based on the significant findings for NQ, NBLI is worthy of further investigation. Modifications to enhance its ability to produce positive gains are discussed.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether content words are selectively highlighted through increased vowel duration in mothers' speech to young children. Fifteen mother-child dyads served as subjects. All children (ages 1:6x2013;2:4) were female and had a mean length of utterance between 1.00 and 1.40 morphemes. Each mother was asked to read five experimental stories aloud to her child and to an adult. The vowel durations of both content words and function words in these stories were examined. Vowels in content wordsx2014;but not function wordsx2014;were significantly longer in child-directed than in adult-directed speech. It is suggested that this characteristic of child-directed speech might heighten young children's attention to content words and contribute to the exclusion of function words during the early stages of English language development.

1987). Attempted sounds are sometimes not: an expanded view of phonological selection and avoidance. ABSTRACTYoung children readily acquire new words with consonants and syllable structures already used accurately (IN words). They have more difficulty acquiring new words with consonants or syllable structures never before produced or attempted (OUT words). In the present study, we examined children's acquisition of a third type of word, containing consonants the children had attempted in the past but never produced accurately (ATTEMPTED words). IN, OUT and ATTEMPTED words and their object referents were presented to 11 young children in a series of play sessions. The children's production and comprehension of the words were then assessed. No comprehension differences among the three types of words were observed. However, ATTEMPTED words as well as OUT words were less likely to be acquired in production than IN words. Some revisions in models of child phonology are proposed to accommodate these findings.

No abstract