Second-language “Immersion” school programs that have been developed in Canada and the United States during the last two decades are described and the results of evaluative research pertaining to them are reviewed. Major Immersion program alternatives (i.e., Early, Delayed, and Late variants) along with their theoretical bases and pedagogical characteristics are described first. Research findings are then discussed with respect to the impact of participation in an Immersion program on the students' native-language development, academic achievement, second-language proficiency, and on their attitudes and second-language use. Also, the suitability of Immersion in different geographical/social settings and for students with distinctive, potentially handicapping characteristics is considered. It is concluded that second-language Immersion programs are feasible and effective forms of education for majority-language children with diverse characteristics.

Phonological recoding is commonly viewed as a back-up mechanism when word identification using the visual pathway fails. A second more important role for phonological recoding is as a self-teaching mechanism by which the child learns to identify words visually. Although phonological recoding may play a minor role in skilled adult reading, it plays a critical role in helping the child become a skilled reader. This article reviews the evidence relevant to these issues. The first section examines evidence on the role of phonological recoding in the development of word identification skills and reading comprehension. The next section reviews evidence showing that children with reading disabilities often have deficits in basic phonological processing skills. The third section deals with the nature of the reading problem in such children which, it is argued, is consistent with the proposed developmental analysis of the importance of phonological recoding in learning to read. The article concludes with a discussion of the teaching implications of these conclusions.

Recent research in phonological disorders has focused on phonological processes, to determine the number of children using particular processes. This study investigated individual patterns of phonological process occurrence in nine phonologically disordered children. The purpose of the study was to determine frequency of occurrence of each process for each child and frequency of occurrence of unusual processes. Results indicated that a small, basic subset of phonological processes seemed to account for the majority of errors made by these children. Unusual processes were primarily changes in word structure. Within the common framework of basic and unusual processes, the children realized the processes in unique ways.

Earlier research has shown that sentence intonation involves frequencies of 500 Hz or less. The present research verified the hypothesis that most hearing-impaired children whose auditory input is limited to those low frequencies do perceive differences in intonation. Their performance was influenced by their response tendencies but was clearly evident across three different acoustic listening conditions and two psychophysical tests. The educational implications of this are discussed briefly.

The ability of Learning Disabled Spellers to abstract spelling patterns was compared to two groups of normal spellers; Poor and Good. One hundred and eighty children were studied: 20 Good Spellers, 20 Poor Spellers, and 20 Learning Disabled Spellers at each age level from 8 to 10 years. Patterns were investigated using three tests; two multiple choice tests, one with nonsense words and one with real words, and a dictation test using nonsense words. The Learning Disabled Spellers showed little ability to abstract patterns at ages 8 and 9 but made considerable improvement from 9 to 10. The performance of the Learning Disabled Spellers was significantly below that of both the Good and Poor Spellers and quite distinct from the Poor Spellers. Error analyses suggest that the responses of the Learning Disabled Spellers are characteristic of those of younger, normal children.

Two studies evaluated the interhemispheric transmission deficit explanation of reading disability comparing second- and sixth-grade poor and normal readers on learning and discrimination tasks that involved hemifield presentations of visual stimuli. In the first of these studies, in the main poor readers performed below the level of normal readers on paired associates learning, regardless of the visual field in which the stimulus appeared, thereby replicating previous findings. In the second study, no differences between reader groups were found on time taken to indicate presence or absence of a simple dot stimulus. It was concluded from the combined results that deficiency in inter-hemispheric transmission is not a significant cause of reading disability.

Forty-eight adult subjects from the northeastern United States were evaluated for their productive use of the causative verbs bring and take. Results revealed that approximately one-fourth of the subjects employed the terms contrastively and consistent with standard use whereas one-third employed a bring over-extension strategy seeming to impute a ‘carry’ meaning to the term. The remaining subjects, although evidencing some take use. did not routinely employ standard, deictically based source or goal distinctions. The validity of the findings was tested in two additional experiments. The nature of these alternative productive strategies and their implications are discussed.

Two forms of an imitation task designed to elicit eleven language behaviors were presented to 32 language impaired children (mean age 7;4, mean MLU 2.9). The tasks differed in terms of the presence or absence of contextual support. To determine how well the imitation tasks could predict spontaneous productions, a multiple regression analysis was performed using the children's spontaneous productions of each behavior as the criterion variable and responses to the same behaviors on each imitation task plus age, sex, MLU, and a measure of memory as predictor variables. The major finding was that predictions of spontaneous production varied among the eleven language behaviors. Additionally, the presence of contextual support had little effect.

Since children with reading disability are known to have problems using a phonetic memory strategy, it was expected that their recall of order would be inferior to that of good readers in situations where a phonetic strategy is optimal, i.e., when temporal order recall, but not necessarily spatial order recall, is required. On separate tests for retention of temporal sequence and spatial location, the good readers were better than the poor readers on the temporal order task as expected, but contrary to expectation, they maintained their superiority on the spatial task as well. Nevertheless, differences in the error patterns of the good and the poor readers are supportive of earlier evidence that links poor readers' short-term memory deficiencies to reduced effectiveness of phonetic representation.

Child language acquisition studies have suggested that some object complement constructions are acquired relatively early compared to other complex constructions. Traditionally, instruction of hearing-impaired students in object complement structures is reserved for intermediate and advanced levels due to their relative syntactic complexity. However, data from 82 basic-level, hearing-impaired college students indicated marked learning of these structures after 10 hours of instruction. Upon investigation of the relative difficulty of four grammatical components of object complements (complement markers, personal pronouns, tense inflection, and word order), tense marking in the complement was found to be the most difficult. We suggest that, in addition to traditional transformational descriptions of syntactic complexity, data on first and second language acquisition be considered when deciding on a sequence of instruction for hearing-impaired students.

Learning disabled (LD) children in the role of interviewer have been found to be less skilled than nondisabled children at initiating and sustaining a dialogue with a classmate. This study tested the effects of modeling on these conversational skills and on metaconversational knowledge. LD and nondisabled boys in grades 2 through 8 listened to either a dialogue of a child interviewer modeling open-ended questions, conversational devices and contingent comments and responses, or a monologue presenting only the interviewee's responses. Each subject was then videotaped interviewing a classmate. Although the dialogue model increased LD children's production of open-ended questions and comments, these strategies appeared more difficult for their listeners to understand and expand. Results of the metaconversational responses suggest that LD children are aware of their difficulties in conversational interaction.

This study examined the onset and acquisition of language comprehension and production in a language delayed child through the analysis of a daily diary kept from 2;5 to 3;10, in order to determine whether such data might contribute to our understanding of normal language development. The onset of both comprehension and production was substantially delayed, yet both underwent word spurts that approximated the normal rate of acquisition. The gap between comprehension and production was also greater than that found in normal children. The existence of the normal spurts was interpreted as indicating biologically determined milestones that are vital in the acquisition process. It is suggested that clinical intervention should set these milestones as goals of therapy.