Young children's skilfulness in conversational interaction is of great importance in understanding pragmatic aspects of language development. The purpose of this investigation was to describe the portion of preschool verbal interaction which could not be considered successful dialogue. Ten dyads of four-year-olds were videotaped during free play. Segments of talk were identified as dialogue or non-dialogue. Non-dialogue was coded when one child did not appear to direct his/her utterances to the other or when an attempted topic failed to capture the interest of the other child. Thirteen types of non-dialogue were identified. Results revealed that all dyads exhibited non-dialogue, but differences were noted in regard to amount and type. Dyads labelled as less co-operative displayed greater amounts of self-directed talk (monologue).

We present a case study of a 43-year-old woman with chronic and stable pure alexia. Using a multiple baseline design we report the results of two different interventions to improve reading. First, a restitutive treatment approach using an implicit semantic access strategy was attempted. This approach was designed to exploit privileged access to lexical–semantic representations and met with little success. Treatment was then switched to a substitutive treatment strategy, which involved using the patient's finger to pretend to copy the letters in words and sentences. Reading using this motor cross-cuing strategy was 100% accurate and doubled in speed after 4 weeks of intervention. We propose that this patient's inability to benefit from the implicit semantic access treatment approach may be in part related to her inability to suppress the segmental letter identification process of word recognition. (JINS, 1998, 4, 636–647.)