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. Despite the rising need, empirical evaluation of reading comprehension interventions for adults with ABI is scarce. This study used a within-subject design to evaluate whether adult college students with ABI with no more than moderate cognitive impairments benefited from using reading comprehension strategies to improve comprehension of expository text. Integrating empirical support from the cognitive rehabilitation and special education literature, the researchers designed a multi-component reading comprehension strategy package. Participants read chapters from an introductory-level college anthropology textbook in two different conditions: strategy and no-strategy. The results indicated that reading comprehension strategy use was associated with recall of more correct information units in immediate and delayed free recall tasks; more efficient recall in the delayed free recall task; and increased accuracy recognising statements from a sentence verification task designed to reflect the local and global coherence of the text. The findings support further research into using reading comprehension strategies as an intervention approach for the adult ABI population. Future research needs include identifying how to match particular reading comprehension strategies to individuals, examining whether reading comprehension performance improves further through the incorporation of systematic training, and evaluating texts from a range of disciplines and genres.

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. They also participated in a standard conversational task. The syntactic complexity of their responses during the speaking tasks was analyzed for mean length of communication unit (MLCU) and clausal density (CD). RESULTS: Both measures of syntactic complexity, MLCU and CD, were substantially greater during the critical-thinking task compared with the conversational task. It was also found that the adolescents understood the questions quite well, earning a mean accuracy score of 80%. CONCLUSIONS: The critical-thinking task has potential for use as a new type of language-sampling tool to examine language production and comprehension in adolescents.

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). Error patterns for which positional asymmetries have been documented (velar fronting, stopping of fricatives and affricates, and cluster reduction) required 4 opportunities in both word-initial and word-final position to meet the study's criterion. RESULTS: None of the tests provided 4 opportunities for every error pattern, the criterion level used in this study. Error patterns that tended to be underrepresented across tests included weak syllable deletion, reduction of word-final clusters, fronting of velars, gliding of liquids, and deaffrication. CONCLUSION: This review will allow clinicians to gain a deeper understanding of the methods used to assess phonological error patterns in single-word tests.

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. Test manuals and response forms were reviewed for psychometric adequacy according to these criteria. RESULTS: The tests included in this review failed to exhibit many of the psychometric properties required of well-designed norm-referenced tests. Of particular concern was lack of adequate sample size, poor evidence of construct validity, and lack of information about diagnostic accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: To ensure that clinicians have access to valid and reliable tests, test developers must make a greater effort to establish that the tests they design have adequate psychometric properties. The authors hope that this review will help clinicians and other professionals to be more aware of some of the limitations of using these tests to make educational decisions.

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. Each adolescent participated in a standard conversational task followed by a narrative task that involved listening to fables and retelling the stories. It was predicted that the narrative task would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than the conversational task because fables, although superficially simple stories, express rather sophisticated meanings. RESULTS: The narrative task elicited greater syntactic complexity than the conversational task as measured by mean length of C-unit and clausal density. Additionally, the 2 syntactic measures, mean length of C-unit and clausal density, were closely associated on both tasks. CONCLUSION: Fables can elicit a high level of syntactic complexity in adolescents with typical language development. Future studies are needed to build a normative database using fables.

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. A spoken persuasive discourse task requiring participants to express their opinion on a topic was administered, and the 2 groups were compared on measures of language productivity, syntactic complexity, and language content. In addition, the relationship between working memory and discourse production was explored. RESULTS: There were no statistically significant group differences on measures of language productivity or syntactic complexity, with the exception of the use of mazes, which was more prevalent in the discourse of the group with ABI. However, there were significant differences in language content, with age-matched peers producing more than twice as many supporting reasons and far fewer tangentially related utterances than the adolescents with ABI. CONCLUSIONS: Persuasive discourse production was affected following ABI. Given the importance of persuasive discourse in social and academic situations, further investigations into factors that influence discourse production in adolescents with ABI are warranted.

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. Listener transcripts were analysed for a measure of intelligibility (percent words correct), as well as error patterns at a segmental (percent syllable resemblance) and suprasegmental (lexical boundary errors) level of perceptual processing. The study found that intelligibility scores for listeners familiarised with dysarthric speech were significantly greater than those of the control group, with the greatest and most robust gains afforded by the explicit familiarisation condition. Relative perceptual gains in detecting phonetic and prosodic aspects of the signal varied dependent upon the familiarisation conditions, suggesting that passive familiarisation may recruit a different learning mechanism to that of a more explicit familiarisation experience involving supplementary written information. It appears that decisions regarding resource allocation during subsequent processing of dysarthric speech may be informed by the information afforded by the conditions of familiarisation.

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 19.4 sessions of intervention that focused on increasing awareness of the morphological structure of words, with particular attention to the orthographic rules that apply when suffixes are added to the base word. RESULTS: Participants in the experimental group made significantly greater gains in reading and spelling accuracy than those in the control group on both experimental and standardized measures of reading and spelling. The results also show that participants were able to generalize to new words what they had learned in the intervention sessions. CONCLUSION: Practitioners should consider the likely benefits of literacy intervention that focuses on developing morphological awareness in conjunction with other types of linguistic awareness.

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. METHOD: Participants were 11 typically developing children ages 1;5-2;7 (years;months) who were from monolingual English-speaking homes. Consonant clusters in both word-initial and word-final position were elicited using a picture identification task. RESULTS: Although previous studies have suggested that most cluster substitutions can be predicted from the errors children make on the corresponding singletons, our findings indicate that almost one third of substitutions in clusters are not predictable in this way. Furthermore, the majority of unpredictable substitutions produced by the children in this study resulted in clusters in which both consonants in the cluster shared the same place and/or manner of articulation. Thus, almost 70% of unpredictable substitutions appear to be motivated by assimilation within the cluster. CONCLUSION: Ease of articulation provides the most convincing explanation for within-cluster assimilation.

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. In Experiment 2, 8.5-month-olds exhibited the same patterns of preference. In Experiments 3 and 4, we investigated whether infants' preferences were driven solely by preferences for sequences of high transitional probability. Although 8.5-month-olds in Experiment 3 were sensitive to the relative probabilities of sequences in the familiarization stimuli, only 12-month-olds in Experiment 4 showed evidence of having grouped alternating segments into a single functional category. Taken together, these results suggest a developmental trajectory for the acquisition of phonological alternations using distributional cues in the input.

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. These results indicate that the perceptually relevant property is instead the continuation of low frequency energy across the vowel-consonant border and not merely the amount of low frequency energy present near the stop. Other experiments establish that neither F(1) nor f(0) at vowel edge integrate perceptually with closure duration, which shows that only auditorily similar properties integrate and not any two properties that reliably covary. Finally, the experiments show that these acoustic properties integrate perceptually (or fail to) in the same way in non-speech analogues as in the original speech. This result indicates that integration arises from the auditory similarity of certain acoustic correlates of the [voice] contrast.

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. Group 2 (n = 9) had received preschool intervention that focused solely on improving speech intelligibility. A third group of children with typical development (Group 3, n = 24) also participated in the study. Two reading tests were administered, one that assessed word recognition and another that assessed nonword decoding. Two tests of morphological awareness were also administered, one that tested the spelling of morphologically complex words and another that tested the oral generation of the base form of derived words. RESULTS: Children with a history of speech impairment who had received phonological awareness intervention (Group 1) performed significantly better on nonword decoding and on the spelling of morphologically complex words than did children with a history of speech impairment whose intervention focused on speech only (Group 2). The typically developing children (Group 3) were not significantly different from Group 1 on the spelling of morphologically complex words, and like Group 1, they outperformed Group 2 on this measure. However, Group 3 did not perform significantly better than Group 2 on nonword decoding, and both of these groups performed significantly more poorly than Group 1 on this measure. There were no group differences in the ability to orally generate base words. CONCLUSION: Children with a history of speech impairment who had received phonological awareness intervention and who became proficient readers demonstrated an ability to use morphological awareness in the spelling process that was similar to that of their peers without speech impairment. These findings highlight the potential long-term benefits associated with early phonological awareness intervention.

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. Neither structural nor frequency factors are able to account for these findings. Further analysis of longitudinal spontaneous production data from 2 children aged 1;1-2;6 provides little support for the role of morphology in explaining these results. We argue that an articulatory account best explains the asymmetries in the production of word-initial and word-final clusters.