This paper purports to give (1) a systematic review of the background and theoretical development leading to the evolvement of the modern approach of language instruction for the hearing impaired child, and (2) a comparison of the grammatical and the developmental schools from the instructional point of view.

Currently language is viewed as a multi-dimensional construct, consisting of three interrelated components; content, form and function (Bloom and Lahey, 1978). In recent publications, language function has been referred to as pragmatics (Prutting, 1979). The essence of pragmatic theory is that language is used functionally in social contexts, to accomplish specific types of communication (Wood, 1981). One such communicative function is referred to as the informative function, which occurs when a speaker provides ideas and information to others, as in describing, naming and giving examples {Wood, 1981). It is not clear, however, when children become competent in making specific, clear statements when describing a referent or event. No study, found by this writer, has provided a detailed analysis of the changes that may occur in baseline descriptive strategies when children are placed under pressure to provide more information. Such data could provide additional insight into children's descriptive abilities at different stages of development. The questions posed in this investigation were: (1) Does referential communication vary under pressure among four, six and eight year old children? and (2) How do four, six and eight year old children's descriptions vary when they are pressured to provide more information?

The focus of this study was the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS), developed by Lee and Canter (1971) and Lee (1974). The DSS is used to analyze a corpus of 50 utterances according to eight grammatical categories. Once a DSS score is determined for an individual child, that child's performance can be compared to that of his/ her peers, using the normative data provided by Lee (1974), and reported by Koenigsknecht (1974). This normative data has been widely used both clinically, and in research projects with little regard for the validity of the norms when applied outside the Midwest, where it was originally normed.

The present study sought to determine the effect different stimulus material has on the language elicited from children. Its purpose was to determine whether a significant difference existed among language samples elicited three different ways when analyzed using DSS. Eighteen children between the ages of 3.6 and 5.6 years were chosen to participate in the study. All of the children had normal bearing. normal receptive vocabulary skills and no demonstrated or suspected physical or social delays. Three language samples. each elicited by either toys. pictures. or stories. were obtained from each child. For each sample. a corpus of 50 utterances was selected for analysis and analyzed according to the DSS procedure as described by Lee and Ganter (1971).

Prepositions are important for the syntactical structure of the sentence and also to relate meaning, particularly meaning associated with concepts of place and time (Washington and Naremore, 1978). Expressive acquisition of function words, including prepositions, is significantly delayed in the hearing impaired population (Cooper and Rosenstein, 1966). Yet, acquisition sequence for expressive prepositions has not been determined for this population. The purpose of this study was to investigate the oral expressive acquisition of locative and directional single word prepositions in severely-to-profoundly hearing impaired children. The question this study sought to answer was: At what age levels are seventeen locative and directional single word prepositions expressively acquired by severely- to-profoundly hearing impaired children?

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