Semantic factors affecting pronoun assignment were studied in a group of aphasie patients. Their ability to assign reference in sentences of the type John telephoned Bill because he needed some information was facilitated by the causal bias of the main verb known to influence the direction of pronoun assignment in normal speakers. The addition of gender constraints (e.g., John telephoned Sue because he needed some information) improved their performance as well. Explicit mention of the referent's name (e.g., John telephoned Bill because John needed some information) did not improve performance any more than did the addition of gender constraints. When these cues were eliminated so that pronoun assignment required a full syntactic analysis, their performance dropped to chance.

This paper describes a language program designed to allow an autistic 4-year-old child to acquire, in a near simultaneous manner, skill across a variety of sentence types. The training, which was focused on teaching the combinatorial and semantic properties of grammatical morphemes, resulted in the child's developing and using sentences whereas he had previously been limited to single words and rote phrases. The improvement occurred across a variety of settings and encompassed both elicited and spontaneous language. As expected from the autistic syndrome, those areas of language functioning requiring social skill (e.g., sustained dialogue) showed continued deficits.

Memory for content, or gist recall, was studied in groups of normal and language-impaired children, matched on age and sex, using a story recall task. The children were pretested for their ability to comprehend individual sentences in the stories. Following a practice session, two test stories were read to each child and oral recall was requested immediately after each story. The content of the recall protocols was analyzed into propositions and scored for accuracy, organization, and temporal ordering. The results showed that the groups differed primarily in the amount of accurate recall, with the language-impaired group recalling considerably less than the normal group. It was concluded that language-impaired children do exhibit deficits in gist recall for material which is within their linguistic grasp.