RESUMEN
This investigation examined the effect of an auditory training program, Fast ForWord-Language, with 26 children ages 7 to 10 years. As two subgroups based on reading ability, all children received 6 wk. of intervention. Thresholds for three conditions of backward masking were obtained pre- and postintervention, and 6 mo. afterward. Immediately following the intervention period, backward masking thresholds improved for all backward masking conditions. Participants also showed increases in language skills and in phoneme awareness but not in reading skills. Six months after intervention, there were improvements in thresholds for backward masking but no improvements in language or reading skills for either group. This study calls into question the efficacy of an intensive auditory training program to improve reading skills.
Asunto(s)
Concienciación , Lenguaje , Fonética , Lectura , Percepción del Habla , Enseñanza , Aprendizaje Verbal , Niño , Humanos , Enmascaramiento Perceptual , PsicofísicaRESUMEN
8 preschoolers with specific language impairment (age range=44-58 mo.) and 8 language-matched, typically developing toddlers (22-29 mo.) participated in a verb comprehension task to investigate sensitivity to auxiliary is in four contexts --grammatical (Who is pushing?), omitted (Who pushing?), ungrammatical (Who in pushing?), and nonsense (Who id pushing?). Analysis yielded a significant interaction: children with specific language impairment had the lowest comprehension in the ungrammatical context and typically developing children had the highest. Perhaps children with specific language impairment, but not younger typically developing children, were sensitive to grammatical co-occurrences. One explanation is that knowledge of morphosyntax exceeded production for children with specific language impairment. Moreover, typically developing children may have ignored morpheme anomalies, perhaps benefitting from other input cues or flexible sentence processing.
Asunto(s)
Comprensión , Trastornos del Desarrollo del Lenguaje/diagnóstico , Semántica , Estimulación Acústica , Preescolar , Femenino , Humanos , Lactante , Masculino , Psicolingüística , Valores de Referencia , Acústica del Lenguaje , Percepción del HablaRESUMEN
Ten 7-8-year-old children with specific language impairment participated in a 6-week program of narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) in an effort to evaluate NBLI's feasibility. Each intervention session targeted story content as well as story and sentence form using story retell and generation tasks. Eight children achieved the clinically significant improvement criterion from pre- and posttest comparisons of at least 1.45 points on a narrative quality (NQ) rating (p<.013). Throughout the NBLI program, the children were informally observed to show increased self-confidence in their narrative production skills. Nearly all children preferred story generation activities over story retell tasks, while story retell tasks were favored over sentence imitation drills. Pre- and posttest comparisons for number of different words, developmental sentence score, and a sentence imitation task were nonsignificant. This indicated no further evidence of positive outcomes for NBLI. Based on the significant findings for NQ, NBLI is worthy of further investigation. Modifications to enhance its ability to produce positive gains are discussed.