Although many studies of slips of the tongue have been conducted with adults, very few investigations have considered children's slips of the tongue. One reason for this is the difficulty in being able to obtain children's spontaneous slips. The present study, therefore, involved the development of a new technique for eliciting slips of the tongue from children by having them repeat short “tongue-twister” phrases. Transcriptions of the subjects' productions were made from tape recordings, and errors that they produced were examined. Durations of various segments were also measured acoustically and analyzed.

Three experiments explored the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants. Pairs of slides were presented, and visual fixation to each recorded. The parent (in Experiments 1 and 2) or the experimenter (in Experiment 3) then prompted the child with the name of one of the slides (“Find the ——,” “Do you see the ——?”), and visual fixation to each was recorded again. Percentage fixation to the picture matching the word referent following the prompt question was compared to initial preference for that picture, providing a measure of the acceptability of the picture as a word referent, independent of its initial salience.

The first experiment demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8–14 and 14–20 months. The second experiment established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months. Word comprehension scores were related to parent report of vocabulary knowledge and difficulty of words. The final experiment measured 1-week test-retest reliability of the word comprehension score at 14 and 20 months and replicated the effect of word difficulty. Methodological and theoretical implications of these results are discussed, in particular, the profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word comprehension.

There is wide agreement that current psycholinguistic techniques (especially discourse analysis) may help us better understand the relationship between psychopathology and linguistic performance. This application would seem particularly worthwhile in the domain of schizophrenic speech, which has resisted adequate characterization in terms of earlier linguistic paradigms. A major effort at systematic psycholinguistic analysis has been made and is most developed in Rochester and Martin's (1979) monograph, Crazy Talk. While we see their interest in utilizing discourse analysis to be very appropriate, it manifests some serious shortcomings. Accordingly, we attempt to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it. This elucidation should provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations.

This study examined the effect of a manual interference task on deaf and hearing college students' written free recall under both immediate- and delayed-recall conditions. The stimuli consisted of printed English words that varied on signability (i.e., words that could be expressed by a single sign) and visual imagery. The manual interference task had a small adverse effect on the deaf students' recall, but this effect did not appear to be related to the use of a kinesthetic sign-based coding strategy. It was also found than the deaf subjects' reading levels were very strongly related to their level of word recall; the better deaf readers recalled more than 50% more words than the poorer readers. Ratings of the deaf subjects' speech intelligibility, however, were not related to their level of word recall.

This study examined the manner in which 10 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and their linguistically normal chronological age (CA) and language age (LA) matched peers repaired overlapping speech. Conversational samples were elicited by an adult examiner from each subject. Instances of overlapping speech were analyzed as being either sentence initial or sentence internal (Gallagher & Craig, 1982). Both types of overlaps were then examined to determine if they required repair, and if so, how they were repaired. It was found that the proportional occurrence of both types of overlap was relatively similar across all three groups. Further, the frequency and nature of repair following sentence initial overlaps was similar across all three groups. However, SLI subjects produced a significantly greater number of unrepaired sentence internal overlaps than did either their CA or LA matched peers.