The relationship between auditory recall and dysfluency in young stutterers

This study examined the relationship between auditory recall and dysfluent behavior in children. Subjects were 11 stutterers and 11 nonstutterers, ages 4.9–11.10. The Auditory Sequential Memory subtest of the ITPA and the Auditory Attention Span for Related Syllables subtest of the Detroit Test of Learning Aptitudes were administered to both groups. Results indicated that scores on the ITPA were not significantly different. Comparison of the group's scores on the DTLA were highly significant with the control group's scoring 35 months higher. After 6 months of therapy, six children in the experimental group were fluent. Posttests revealed no significant differences on the ITPA. On the DTLA, the experimental group's mean scores significantly increased by 13.9 months. The gain in auditory recall of meaningful material substantiated the hypothesized relationship between auditory recall and dysfluency. This relationship was not viewed as causative of stuttering; data were interpreted as evidence that increased fluency allows children to use previously suppressed linguistic data.     

The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test: Implications for the diagnosis and prediction of reading achievement

The Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test (BG) is a commonly used measure of visual-motor performance and is often used as part of the predictive or diagnostic reading battery. This article reviews 32 published research studies in three areas: the utility of the BG as a predictor of reading; the relationship between the BG and reading achievement measured concurrently; the ability of the BG to differentiate between good and poor readers. The research reviewed suggests that the continued use of the BG (scored using discrete error systems) as part of the predictive or diagnostic reading battery is not warranted.     

The influence of working memory on reading growth in subgroups of children with reading disabilities

This 3-year longitudinal study determined whether (a) subgroups of children with reading disabilities (RD) (children with RD only, children with both reading and arithmetic deficits, and low verbal IQ readers) and skilled readers varied in working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM) growth and (b) whether growth in an executive system and/or a phonological storage system mediated growth in reading performance. A battery of memory and reading measures was administered to 84 children (11-17 years of age) across three testing waves spaced 1 year apart. The results showed that skilled readers yielded higher WM growth estimates than did the RD groups. No significant differentiation among subgroups of children with RD on growth measures emerged. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that WM (controlled attention), rather than STM (phonological loop), was related to growth in reading comprehension and reading fluency. The results support the notion that deficient growth in the executive component of WM underlies RD.     

Dyslexia, dysnomia, and lexical retrieval: a longitudinal investigation

Results from a 3-year longitudinal investigation of confrontation naming in 98 children (75 average readers, 14 severely impaired readers, 9 bilingual readers) indicate: kindergarten performance on confrontation naming predicts Grade 2 reading performance, particularly reading comprehension; confrontation naming differentiates average from severely impaired readers; and lexical retrieval, not vocabulary knowledge, is the major source of difference between reading groups. Findings on lexical retrieval are integrated with research on naming access speed. The implications of these results for specification of dyslexia subgroups are discussed.     

A study of language functioning in Alzheimer patients

Language functioning in Alzheimer's disease is reviewed and the performance of 25 Alzheimer patients on a standard battery is reported. All these hospitalized patients were aphasic to some degree. As a group, they differed from normals on all language variables, and from stroke patients in terms of higher fluency and lower comprehension. Spontaneous speech showed high incidence of circumlocutions and semantic jargon, but no phonemic paraphasias or target approximations. Syllabic perseverations, shouting, inappropriate laughter, and mutism were late-appearing features. Transcortical Sensory, and Wernicke's aphasias were frequent, but Broca's and Transcortical Motor aphasias notably absent. Extent of language impairment correlated with current length of hospitalization but not age. Reading, writing, and performance scores except praxis, were lower than oral language scores. Findings were discussed in relation to previous results, methodology, and language organization in the brain.     

Reading skills of hearing and congenitally deaf children

The present study examined the nature of reading skills in congenitally deaf and hearing children 7–19 years of age. Deaf children were drawn from oralist and total communication programs. A visual detection task was designed to assess the extent of phonological coding and chunking used in reading a story of various degrees of syntactic, semantic, and orthographic complexity. The results provide evidence that (1) like hearing children, deaf children tend to use orthographic regularities in their reading: (2) there is no relation in the deaf child's performance between sensitivity to orthographic regularities and the type of communication method used in training; and (3) hearing and deaf readers use qualitatively similar psycholinguistic strategies in their processing of a story.     

Disfluency of nonstuttering children in relation to specific measures of language,reading, and mental maturity

Speech samples from 92 first-grade children were quantified on the basis of disfluency types and judges' ratings of language level. Intelligence and reading scores were also obtained for each subject. Correlational analysis indicated that the measures of language performance, intelligence, and reading ability used in this study were not highly and significantly associated with frequency of disfluency whether considered by individual type, type combinations, or total disfluency.     

The effect of quantity and quality of verbal interaction on ratings of leadership ability

Sixteen four-member groups engaged in a problem-solving situation in which the goal was to maximize gains and minimize losses in a matrix type game. One of the members of each group, a trained confederate, independently varied his quantity and quality of verbal interaction in order to determine their importance in determining leadership emergence. While quality of verbal interaction was found to predict perceived differences on such variables as competence, influence, and contribution to the group's goal, only quantity of verbal interaction predicted perceived differences in leadership ability. The data suggest that this paradox may be due to quantity being a clearer indication of a group member's intentions than quality.     

Eysenck's theory of criminality and the personality types and offences of young delinquents

It has been proposed recently that the conflicting findings in studies of Eysenck's theory of criminality may be explicable in terms of the different personality subgroupings within the criminal population. It is proposed further that these different personality types may be associated with particular kinds of offences.The results of the present study confirm the existence of different personality types within a delinquent population. Four subgroups were identified, two of which were consistent with predictions from Eysenck's theory. The four subgroups could be distinguished on the basis of number of previous convictions but not by the kinds of offence committed. It is suggested, however, that future studies of this question, instead of examining kinds of offence committed, should focus their attention on situational components of the offences committed by the different personality subgroups.The general pattern of results is interpreted as supporting a modified or limited model of Eysenck's theory of criminality.     

Rapid alternating stimulus naming in the developmental dyslexias

A rapid, alternating stimulus (RAS) naming measure was designed to study the developing ability in dyslexic readers to direct attention to contextual patterns while performing a rapid serial naming task. The results from a 3-year longitudinal investigation of 98 children indicate three trends. RAS performances differentiate both average from impaired readers and dyslexic subgroups from each other. The largest, most impaired subgroup can not complete the RAS tasks in kindergarten; the smaller subgroups have little name access speed deficits. Early RAS performances are highly predictive of later reading, particularly at the single-word reading level. Implications for understanding the development of automaticity and the relationship between retrieval speed and reading are discussed.     

Effects of Small-Group and One-on-One Reading Fluency Interventions with Second Grade, Low-Performing Spanish Readers

This study compared children’s Spanish reading performance across 2 reading intervention conditions: small group versus individual (teacher–student). Six second-grade Costa Rican students with low Spanish reading ability participated in the study. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare the relative effectiveness of the 2 interventions to each other and to a no-intervention control condition. Results showed that nearly all students benefitted from 1 or both of the reading interventions. Findings are consistent with previous research with English readers and suggest that delivering fluency-based reading interventions with fidelity (such as those described in the current study) to Spanish readers may be an effective way to improve Spanish-speaking students’ reading skills. Results are also consistent with past research on the comparable effectiveness of delivering a reading-fluency intervention to a small group versus an individual. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of relative efficiency in the delivery of reading-fluency interventions, and with respect to educators in and out of the United States who work with students struggling with Spanish-reading fluency.     

Metalinguistic awareness and language development

Thirty-six 3- and 4-year-old children were given a battery of six metalinguistic tasks and two measures of language development: the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and a sentence comprehension test. The results clearly showed that the majority of preschoolers were able to make at least some metalinguistic judgments, and that metalinguistic performance improved with age. Furthermore, overall performance on the metalinguistic tasks was significantly correlated with each language measure when the effects of age were partialed out. In contrast, the correlation between age and metalinguistic performance was not significant once the effects of both language measures were partialed out. These data demonstrate that preschoolers' metalinguistic abilities are more extensive than has been previously acknowledged, and that they are closely tied to other aspects of language development at this time.     

A new measure for determining children's subjective organization of speech

A new technique for determining children's subjective organization of speech is described. The technique consists of teaching a child a sentence and then repeatedly (1) reading the sentence up to a selected point, (2) sounding a tone, and (3) having the child supply the next word. The time from the tone to the onset of the child's voice is the dependent variable. In the first study 6- and 8-year-old children memorized the following sentence: “John likes to feed the little puppies in the barn.” Their response times suggested that the dominant segmentation pattern consisted of four phrases: a subject phrase, a verb phrase, an object phrase and a modifier phrase. Within each phrase differences between reaction times were on the order of 30 msec. Across phrases they were on the order of 120 msec. The same trend emerged for subsamples of the children with various short-term memory sizes, and for adults. It also appeared for subsamples of the total scores (e.g., first six trials and last six trials). In order to provide further evidence of the technique's validity, different sentences of the same general type were presented to children with short-term memory spans of either 3, 4, or 5. As predicted, it was found that when children's spans corresponded to the number of hypothesized chunks (i.e., 4), they could repeat the sentences verbatim on the first exposure. They could not do so, however, when their spans were lower than that value or when the number of phrases was increased. It was concluded that the new technique is a promising one for assessing young children's patterns of speech segmentation.     

Father identification,achievement, and occupational behavior of rural youth: 10-year follow-up

Males from rural economically deprived school districts, who had previously been surveyed as high school seniors, again 1 year after graduation, and again 5 years after graduation, were surveyed a fourth and final time 10 years after high school graduation concerning their occupational status and aspirations, their marital status, their spouses' educational and occupational achievements, the importance of life roles, and their occupational and personal satisfactions. In the original study the participants had been divided into two groups, low-identification males (LIM) and high-identification males (HIM) based on independent evaluators' judgments of the adequacy of their fathers as identification models. Each group's responses to the survey were compared. The results indicate that there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups on the variables of optimism about the future, spouses' occupational achievements, role importance, occupational satisfaction, and personal satisfaction. There were statistically significant differences on the variables of occupational status, occupational aspirations, educational achievements, educational plans, marital status, and spouses' educational achievements. The results are discussed in the context of the three previous surveys. Over the 10-year period the occupational and educational achievements and aspirations have been significantly higher for the HIM group than for the LIM group. Equally consistent is the finding that over the 10-year period there has been no differences between the two groups in satisfaction with status.     

When children write nonwords to dictation

Skill in written spelling of simple, monosyllabic nonwords was investigated in 9- to 11-year-old English children. Two aspects of their spellings were of interest: first, could they spell these nonwords so that they sounded correct (nonword spelling accuracy), and second, did their spellings show evidence of biasing from words heard earlier in the test sequence? Nonword spelling was poorer for children of this age than for tested adults. Nevertheless, significant biasing occurred in these children's spellings, though not to the same extent as in adults' nonword spellings, and significant correlations emerged between reading age, nonword spelling skill, susceptibility to biasing, and real word spelling skill. Children with a reading age greater than 11 years showed biasing from word spellings that was within range of that reported for adults, and, for these more skilled readers, word spelling accuracy correlated significantly with both susceptibility to biasing and with nonword spelling accuracy. These children were not as accurate as tested adults at spelling nonwords. Children with a reading age below 11 years were poorer at nonword spelling and showed no overall biasing, yet they also showed a significant correlation between word spelling skill and nonword biasing. Together with evidence from the same task from adults with specific spelling disorders, these results suggest that word knowledge had a direct (biasing) and an indirect (general word spelling knowledge) effect on the performance of the nonword spelling task. But although skill in word spelling may be a necessary prerequisite for nonword spelling, it need not always be sufficient.     

THE ACQUISITION OF GRAPHEME‐PHONEME CORRESPONDENCES IN A WORD LEARNING TASK

Abstract

The relationship between reading ability with receptive vocabulary level and the ability to induce grapheme‐phoneme relationships was investigated using grade one students. The ability to induce relationships was assessed by a word learning task in which the stimuli were six consonant‐vowel‐consonant trigrams composed of seven letter‐like forms with a 1:1 grapheme‐phoneme correspondence. The word learning task was followed by a test of each student's acquisition of the grapheme‐phoneme correspondences that appeared in the word stimuli. The ability to induce the relationships was found to be much more strongly related to reading ability than receptive vocabulary. The results suggest that good and poor readers applied different word learning strategies, with good readers appearing to apply more readily a principled solution and poor readers an associative solution. The results are consistent with the theory of reading acquisition advanced by Gibson and Levin.     

Spontaneous versus instructed use of multiple standards for evaluating comprehension: Effects of age,reading proficiency,and type of standard

Nine- and eleven-year-old children differing in reading proficiency read and commented on brief expository passages containing three different types of embedded problems (nonsense words, prior knowledge violations, and internal inconsistencies). Half of the children were specifically instructed as to the types of standards they should apply in order to detect the problems (lexical, external consistency, and internal consistency); the remaining children were simply instructed to look for problems. Both quantitative and qualitative differences in standard use were revealed by the children's comments about all parts of the passages. Older and better readers used more different standards and they used them more frequently than younger and poorer readers. The lexical standard was more likely to be adopted spontaneously than the other two standards and it was the only standard used by a substantial proportion of both younger and poorer readers. Finally, the consistent effects of instruction type indicate that children's evaluation activities were strongly influenced by the amount of guidance received.     

Attribution at the wire: Consistency and outcome finish strong

The present study used videotaped horse races to test Kelley's attribution theory of the way people perceive the causes of behavior. The subjects (81 college students) were given programs containing specially constructed information about the horses before each race and afterward completed a questionnaire indicating their perceptions about the horses' performance. As predicted, the performances of winning horses, as well as performances consistent in outcome with the horse's previous races were attributed more to the actor, the horse, and less to circumstances. Winning performances were less attributed to external factors (i.e., the field of horses). significant, but relatively small, consistency by outcome interactions also were found.     

Children’s implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about mathematics and reading ability

Study objectives were to clarify children’s gender-based implicit and explicit mathematics and reading stereotypes, and to determine if implicit and explicit measures were related or represented distinct constructs. One hundred and fifty-six boys and girls (mean age 11.3 years) from six elementary schools completed math or reading stereotype measures. Results for the implicit measures showed that children believed their own gender was superior in mathematics ability, and that girls but not boys believed that girls were better in reading. Explicit measures revealed that girls but not boys believed they were superior at math, and that girls and boys believed girls were better readers than boys. Implicit and explicit measures were not related. Results are discussed in relation to previous studies on children’s mathematics and reading gender stereotypes and large scale tests of mathematics and reading achievement. Educational and research implications are discussed.