Examines the suggestions found in Michael Canale's paper, "Considerations in the Testing of Reading and Listening Proficiency," in the light of a possible U.S. Government's Interagency Language Roundtable receptive skills proficiency test which must supply the answer to the question of how well an individual can understand a particular…

Describes and assesses what can be achieved in the learning and testing of the receptive language skills with computer hardware now available. Provides guidelines and suggestions for the development of language learning and testing software. Defines three types of computer programs: instructional, collaborative, and facilitative. (SED)

Shows how a significant literary question of preindustrial Europe--What causes one person to listen to another?--is still of major importance in a nuclear age. (MM)

This paper reviews the literature on the role of judgment and collaboration between clinicians and researchers to identify and instruct students with reading difficulties, particularly reading difficulties based on either underlying core deficits in phonological processing or poor language comprehension. For students with speech-sound based…

A model of language abilities in matrix form is described in which areas of language ability are defined in terms of the effects of receptive and expressive language processes on four linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. (Author)

Speech, speechreading, and manual reception skills of 78 deaf students were evaluated over a 2-year interval of residency at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in order to determine the relative stability of these skills within an integrated environment which stresses the use of amplification and oral-aural instruction. (Author)

The study examined patterns of cognitive ability in 57 cleft lip and palate children (ages 7 to 9) with verbal deficit, but without general intellectual retardation to evaluate whether the verbal disability displayed by these children was related primarily to a specific verbal expression deficit or a more general symbolic mediation problem.…

Maternal ostensive naming was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 12 children. Display, demonstration, and pointing were coded with regard to whether and how coexisting speech referred to gesture focus. Maternal input was found to be significantly correlated with children's reported receptive vocabulary. (Author/JL)

Examined morphosyntax in persons with Williams Syndrome (WS). Analyzed receptive language of English-speaking WS persons and grammatical gender assignment of French-speaking WS persons. Found within-domain dissociations in grammatical gender assignment across several sentence elements and difficulties in understanding embedded sentences, which…

The performance data of individuals with Alzheimer's on language comprehension and expression tests are presented and discussed in the context of possible contributions from impaired working memory functions. It is argued that diminished scores result primarily from attenuated span capacity, difficulty focusing attention, encoding, and activation…

This study compared factors contributing to Quick Incidental Learning of new vocabulary by 50 5-year olds with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 comparison groups. Although SLI children exhibited a robust representational mapping ability, performance was modulated by a minimum input constraint and apparent problems with storage into…

Lack of gestalt imagery (the ability to create imaged wholes) can contribute to language comprehension disorder characterized by weak reading comprehension, weak oral language comprehension, weak oral language expression, weak written language expression, difficulty following directions, and a weak sense of humor. Sequential stimulation using an…

This study found that 61 children (ages 8-12) with specific language impairment performed more poorly on a comprehension task in which children were questioned about a story, even after taking into account "comprehension age." The effects of mode of presentation (orally or pictorially) and question type were similar for subjects and controls.…