Publications by authors named "R B Gillam"
Purpose: Our aim was to (a) develop a sentence comprehension measure that distinguished between cognitive capacity and syntactic knowledge in school-age children and (b) examine the relationship between comprehension performance and cognitive variables (working memory capacity and retrieval from long-term memory).
Method: We developed and administered a picture selection sentence comprehension task to 122 school-age children representing varied cognitive abilities. We evaluated comprehension accuracy and response time in two syntactically identical conditions but with different cognitive demands incorporated in picture foils-one with low demand using superfluous adjectives and another with high demand using contrastive adjectives.
Purpose: In this validation study, we examined the factor structure of the mediated learning observation (MLO) used during the teaching phase of dynamic assessment. As an indicator of validity, we evaluated whether the MLO factor structure was consistent across children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).
Method: Two hundred twenty-four children (188 typically developing and 36 DLD) from kindergarten to second grade completed a 30-min individual mediated learning session on narrative production.
Purpose: Clinicians address a wide range of oral language skills when working with school-age students with language and literacy difficulties (LLDs). Therefore, there is a critical need for carefully designed, rigorously tested, multicomponent contextualized language interventions (CLIs) that have a high likelihood of successful implementation and measurable academic impacts. This clinical focus article summarizes the development and testing of a CLI entitled Supporting Knowledge in Language and Literacy (SKILL), which is a supplementary narrative intervention program for elementary school-age children.
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- The paper presents a new method, the Bilingual Multidimensional Ability Scale (B-MAS), to help clinicians identify developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children.
- Three bilingual speech-language pathologists analyzed 166 profiles of Spanish-English bilingual kids, examining both direct and indirect measures of language ability.
- The B-MAS identified 21 children with DLD, showing that the raters largely agreed on their evaluations, suggesting that this tool could be used in clinical settings to improve diagnosis for bilingual populations.