In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological internal structure assigned to words and eliminating morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena. A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.

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The purpose of this study was to determine whether three preschool children with autism or autistic-like behaviors would learn and generalize pretend play activities targeted at two different play levels-a developmentally appropriate (DA) level and an age appropriate (AA) level-differently. The children's readiness for the DA play level was assessed with the Developmental Play Assessment (DPA) instrument (Lifter, Edwards, Avery, Anderson, & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1968). We taught individual exemplars from the two different play levels one at a time, to each of the children, in a sequential treatments design. In contrast to the consistently acquired DA activities, the activities of the AA category apparently were more difficult, and in most cases, they were not acquired In addition, the children were less likely to generalize the AA skills to other activities or toys. The results are discussed in terms of (a) the importance of developmental considerations in selecting instructional objectives, and (b) the usefulness of directly teaching play activities to children with developmental disabilities.Play is regarded as the "work" of childhood, and accordingly serves several important functions in development. As children engage in play activities they leam about objects and events, leam language for talking about these objects and events, and develop a range of interactions with parents and peers (Garvey,

Developmentally specific play programs were designed for three children with pervasive developmental disorders being served in a home-based program. Using the Developmental Play Assessment, six activities for each of three adjacent developmentally sequenced play categories were targeted for direct instruction using different toy sets. A modified multiple-baseline across play targets design was employed. Teaching procedures capitalized on following the child's lead and employed least-to-most prompting procedures. Results showed children reached acquisition criteria for 85% (range: 75-100%) of 40 play activities that were generated from emerging play categories and 81% (range: 50-100%) of 16 play activities generated from successive, but non-emerging play categories. Findings are discussed related to the importance of increasing developmental specificity when targeting and teaching play activities.

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