Past research has demonstrated that recasts can facilitate young children's language development, even when embedded into stories. A recast occurs when one sentence is immediately followed by another sentence which reiterates the meaning of the first, but changes one or more of its syntactical components. Twenty 3-and 4-year-old Head Start children participated in this study. Ten children were read a story which incorporated recasts into its 20-page text. Ten different children were read a story similar in every aspect to the recast story (length, pictures, vocabulary, and syntactical complexity) except that this story modelled forms rather than recasting them. Modelling differs from recasting in that there is no paired presentation of sentences. Elicitation tasks measured both groups' syntactic and lexical abilities before and after the story readings. Analyses of covariance, using pre-test scores as covariates, indicated no significant differences between the recasting and modelling groups. Both groups made equal language gains. A key factor in these results may be the shared meaning between communicators allowed by both recasts and models. These data suggest further research regarding educational and clinical applications of both recasting and modelling.

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This study examined the development of some of the directional rules children use in drawing. A broader age range than in previous studies was used to analyze the following drawing rules: top-to-bottom, left-to-right, threading in a continuous clockwise or counterclockwise direction, and nonthreading. These rules were tested across three different age groups (4-and 5-year-olds, 6-and 7-year-olds, and 8-to lO-year-olds) and three figure types (circular, square, and apex). Age and figure type interacted to significantly influence the percentage of rule use . Two tasks, copying and modeling, were compared to test the robustness of these rules to task variation. Task did not greatly influence the selecton of drawing rules. The implications from this study are that the process of drawing is rule-governed, and that some of the rules children use, robust to task variation, shift in kind with age.

In this study, hearing-impaired children received supplementary instruction designed to simultaneously enhance text skills and general communication skills. Microcomputer-assisted instruction was used, emphasizing exploratory learning—not typical programmed instruction. Microcomputer presentations of pictures, text, and sign language were directly initiated by the children from a special keyboard during exploratory learning phases. A teacher also was an essential part of the instructional process, sustaining dialogue to stimulate the children's communication and their attention to the text, sign, and pictures. Tests required the children to "write" their text answers on the TV screen by pressing the words on their keyboards to match an action sequence on the TV. A total of 79 hearing-impaired children with ages between 3.2 and 14.3 years participated in the project. The children mastered a series of lessons and learned to write text sentences that were highly accurate interpretations of either animated pictured action sequences (an average of 94% correct) or sign language sentence animations (96%-98% correct). Moreover, the children made significant advances on two measures of general communication—sentence imitation and referential communication.

Recasts have been shown to be successful in promoting the language development of normal children. A RECAST is a discourse adjustment through which basic semantic information is retained while syntactic structure is altered. Little research to date has addressed the power of recasts in advancing the development of specifically language-impaired children. The language-impaired child is believed to be delayed, but not deviant from the normal child, in acquiring language. For this reason, it is suggested that the same kind of linguistic input beneficial to normal children should be beneficial to language-impaired children. This paper includes a review of the literature on the effects of recasts on normal language acquisition. The rare event cognitive comparison model (Nelson, 1980;1987) is presented in an attempt to describe how a child might use recasts to help acquire language. Finally, a section on the potential use of recasts to aid in the development of language-impaired children is presented.