This study investigated narrative abilities and their relation to theory of mind in autistic and mentally retarded subjects, who were matched for their linguistic competence on standardized measures of comprehension and production. We asked 27 autistic, 27 mentally retarded, and 17 normal subjects (whose age range matched the verbal mental age ranges of the developmentally disordered groups) to tell the story from a wordless picture book. Following their spontaneous narratives, a set of probe questions was asked about the story characters' feeling states. The autistic and mentally retarded subjects were also given a standard test of false belief. The main findings were that, when closely matched on language ability, no significant group differences were found on measures of narrative length, use of lexical cohesion devices, and mental state terms. On the probed questions, the autistic and mentally retarded subjects gave fewer appropriate emotion responses than the normal subjects, and the autistic subjects had difficulty explaining the emotional states correctly. For the autistic sample, the narrative measures were significantly correlated with performance on the theory of mind task. The findings are interpreted in terms of the contributions of both linguistic and social–cognitive factors in narrative ability.

This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower level analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of the variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved to facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and text cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.

The concept of proficient bilingualism or biliteracy (proficiency in reading and writing in both Spanish and English) has.been used in research on linguistic and academic processes among Mexican American children, but rarely has it been used to examine noncognitive outcomes in this population. Biliteracy – a quality that strengthens cultural identity and facilitates adaptation to the mainstream society – hypothetically contributes to the growth of self-esteem among Mexican Americans. Biliteracy is arguably more relevant to the development of self-concept among Mexican American children than Spanish proficiency or a general notion of bilingualism. Drawing on data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS 88), this article compares self-deprecation, self-confidence, and fatalistic belief among Mexican American 8th graders who reported themselves as biliterate, English monoliterate, Spanish monoliterate, or oral bilingual. Controlling for the effects of sociodemographic background and school experience, ordinary least-square regression analysis generated supportive results. Mexican American children who identified themselves as biliterate had higher self-confidence than other groups (English or Spanish monoliterates and oral bilinguals). Logistic regression analysis found a strong interaction effect between self-identity and birthplace (United States or foreign) and parents' education. Among students born in the United States, parents' education was negatively related to biliterate identity. In contrast, parents' education was positively associated with biliterate identity among those who were foreign-born.

Does bilingualism facilitate the development of cognitive abilities, and if so, how? According to the level of bilingualism hypothesis (Diaz, 1983), only in the early stages of second language acquisition does bilingualism foster cognitive ability. This hypothesis was tested on a sample of 3rd and 4th grade Mexican Spanish-English bilinguals with low English proficiency. Knowledge of Spanish and English in phonology, vocabulary, and syntax was measured. Nonverbal general intelligence was assessed with the Raven Colored Progressive Matrices, and verbal intelligence was assessed with a subtest of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery. No relationship was found between degree of bilingualism and nonverbal intelligence, contrary to the level of bilingualism hypothesis. The results suggest that the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development are not solely dependent on the level of second language proficiency.

This study examines maternal talk about events in which persons or objects are hidden, missing, or absent, and the relationship of maternal language to the child's acquisition of words for disappearance. Twelve mother-child pairs were videotaped in the home during play when the children were 12, 15, and 18 months of age. The mothers kept a diary of the children 's words. Maternal language was coded during four types of disappearance events: peekaboo, hidden object games, missing objects, and absent entities. Children who had acquired gone and similar terms experienced more disappearance events and heard more maternal talk about disappearance than children who had not acquired a word for disappearance.

The goal of this study was to compare clinical and psycholinguistic approaches to the measurement of verbal behavior according to their ability to discriminate schizophrenic (n = 11) from manic-depressive (n = 11) and normal control (n = 11) subjects. Language samples were obtained during Rorschach testing and analyzed using a clinical measure, the Thought Disorder Index (TDI), and a battery of linguistic measures. Five linguistic categories were examined: productivity, repetition, dysfluency, cohesiveness, and syntactic complexity. On the clinical measure, schizophrenic subjects had high thought disorder scores. On the linguistic measures, the speech of schizophrenics differed significantly from the other two groups in productivity and in the number of clearly referenced elements, a measure of cohesion. This measure of cohesion was positively correlated with TDI scores. The findings are discussed in terms of the benefits of using more objective and quantitative measurements in research on thought disorganization in schizophrenia.