Evaluation of use of reading comprehension strategies to improve reading comprehension of adult college students with acquired brain injury.

Adults with mild to moderate acquired brain injury (ABI) often pursue post-secondary or professional education after their injuries in order to enter or re-enter the job market. An increasing number of these adults report problems with reading-to-learn. The problem is particularly concerning given the growing population of adult survivors of ABI.

Critical thinking about fables: examining language production and comprehension in adolescents.

Purpose: This study was designed primarily to determine if a critical-thinking task involving fables would elicit greater syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents. Another purpose was to determine how well adolescents understand critical-thinking questions about fables.

Method: Forty adolescents (N=20 boys and 20 girls; mean age=14 years) with typical language development answered critical-thinking questions about the deeper meanings of fables.

Content coverage of single-word tests used to assess common phonological error patterns.

Purpose: This review evaluated whether 9 single-word tests of phonological error patterns provide adequate content coverage to accurately identify error patterns that are active in a child's speech.

Method: Tests in the current study were considered to display sufficient opportunities to assess common phonological error patterns if they provided at least 4 opportunities for each of 11 error patterns. The target phonemes for these error patterns had to occur as singletons (except for final consonant deletion and cluster reduction) and in stressed syllables (except for weak syllable deletion).

A psychometric review of norm-referenced tests used to assess phonological error patterns.

Purpose: The authors provide a review of the psychometric properties of 6 norm-referenced tests designed to measure children's phonological error patterns. Three aspects of the tests' psychometric adequacy were evaluated: the normative sample, reliability, and validity.

Method: The specific criteria used for determining the psychometric adequacy of these tests were based on current recommendations in the literature.

Conversational and narrative speaking in adolescents: examining the use of complex syntax.

Purpose: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development.

Method: Forty adolescents (Mage = 14;0 [years;months]; 20 boys and 20 girls) were individually interviewed.

Familiarisation conditions and the mechanisms that underlie improved recognition of dysarthric speech.

This investigation evaluated the familiarisation conditions required to promote subsequent and more long-term improvements in perceptual processing of dysarthric speech and examined the cognitive-perceptual processes that may underlie the experience-evoked learning response. Sixty listeners were randomly allocated to one of three experimental groups and were familiarised under the following conditions: (1) neurologically intact speech (control), (2) dysarthric speech (passive familiarisation), and (3) dysarthric speech coupled with written information (explicit familiarisation). All listeners completed an identical phrase transcription task immediately following familiarisation, and listeners familiarised with dysarthric speech also completed a follow-up phrase transcription task 7 days later.

Spoken persuasive discourse abilities of adolescents with acquired brain injury.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the performance of adolescents with acquired brain injury (ABI) during a spoken persuasive discourse task. Persuasive discourse is frequently used in social and academic settings and is of importance in the study of adolescent language.

Method: Participants included 8 adolescents with ABI and 8 peers without ABI who were matched for age, gender, and education.

Integrated morphological awareness intervention as a tool for improving literacy.

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve reading and spelling ability through instruction in morphological awareness together with other forms of linguistic awareness, including knowledge of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics.

Method: Sixteen children aged between 8;07 (years;months) and 11;01 who demonstrated specific spelling difficulties were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control group. Participants received an average of 19.

Substitution errors in the production of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters.

Purpose: This study provides a comprehensive examination of substitutions that occur at Greenlee's 3rd stage of cluster development (M. Greenlee, 1974). At this stage of cluster acquisition, children are able to produce the correct number of consonants but with 1 or more of these consonants being substituted for another.

Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants.

We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had different preferences for novel sequences involving voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives, suggesting that each group had internalized a different familiarization alternation.

On the internal perceptual structure of distinctive features: The [voice] contrast.

Several fixed classification experiments test the hypothesis that F(1), f(0), and closure voicing covary between intervocalic stops contrasting for [voice] because they integrate perceptually. The perceptual property produced by the integration of these acoustic properties was at first predicted to be the presence of low frequency energy in the vicinity of the stop, which is considerable in [+voice] stops but slight in [-voice] stops. Both F(1) and f(0) at the edges of vowels flanking the stop were found to integrate perceptually with the continuation of voicing into the stop, but not to integrate with one another.

Longitudinal effects of phonological awareness intervention on morphological awareness in children with speech impairment.

Purpose: This study examined reading performance and morphological awareness development in 2 groups of children with speech impairment who had received differing types of intervention during their preschool years.

Method: The children were aged between 7;6 and 9;5 (years;months) at the time of the study. Group 1 (n = 8) had received preschool intervention to facilitate phonological awareness and letter knowledge in addition to improving speech production.

Asymmetries in the acquisition of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters.

Previous work on the acquisition of consonant clusters points to a tendency for word-final clusters to be acquired before word-initial clusters (Templin, 1957; Lleó & Prinz, 1996; Levelt, Schiller & Levelt, 2000). This paper evaluates possible structural, morphological, frequency-based, and articulatory explanations for this asymmetry using a picture identification task with 12 English-speaking two-year-olds. The results show that word-final stop+/s/ clusters and nasal+/z/ clusters were produced much more accurately than word-initial /s/+stop clusters and /s/+nasal clusters.