Alan G. Kamhi

The Use of Think-Aloud Protocols to Compare Inferencing Abilities in Average and Below-Average Readers

In this study, we examined whether think-aloud procedures would uncover differences in the kinds of inferences generated by average and below-average readers. Participants were 40 third-grade children who were divided into groups of average and below-average readers. All participants completed measures of nonverbal IQ, reading, language, and working memory, and a story comprehension task that consisted of two conditions: listen through and think aloud. The major findings in this study were that (a) average readers generated significantly more explanatory inferences than below-average readers, and (b) comprehension performance as measured by story recall was significantly better for both groups in the think-aloud condition than in the listen-through condition. The discussion addresses the implications of these findings.

Nonlinguistic Symbolic and Conceptual Abilities of Language-Impaired and Normally Developing Children.

This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverbal intelligence suffer from representational and symbolization deficits (Morehead & Ingram, 1973). The study also examined the developing concepts of class, number, and order in these children to evaluate the claim that their thinking and reasoning in the nonlinguistic domain were within normal limits. Subjects were language-impaired children and two groups of normally developing children, one matched for MA and the other for MLU to the language-imparied group. Each group consisted of ten children. Each child was administered six nonstandardized cognitive tasks from the Piagetian literature. These tasks were designed to assess developing nonlinguistic symbolic abilities and conceptual knowledge of class, number, and order relations. The language-impaired children consistently performed better than MLU-matched controls but more poorly than MA-matched peers. However, only one task--Haptic Recognition--uncovered a significant difference between the language-impaired and MA-matched groups. The difficulty that language-impaired children experienced on this task was taken as evidence that they had deficient nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. Some tentative conclusions are offered concerning the role representational abilities play in language development.

The Linguistic Basis of Reading DisordersImplications for the Speech-Language Pathologist

Recent theory and clinical insight have emphasized the linguistic aspects of reading and reading disorders. As a result, some speech-language pathologists are playing a more integral role in the id...

Metalinguistic Awareness in Normal and Language-Disordered Children

The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between delayed linguistic performance and metalinguistic abilities. A metalinguistic task involving the identification and revis...

Trying To Make Sense of Developmental Language Disorders.

In this article, I share my thoughts concerning what children with developmental language disorders should be called, how they should be defined, and how we might differentiate children with specific language impairment (SLI) from other children with developmental language disorders. Among other things, I attempt to show why a lack of congruence between clinical and research constructs should be expected. Researchers and clinicians use different identification criterion and procedures because clinical and educational objectives are different from research objectives. While recognizing these differences, I suggest several possible ways to differentiate a subgroup of children with SLI from the general population of children with developmental language disorders without using nonverbal IQ. Even if researchers are able to identify this unique group of children, clinicians may never embrace the SLI construct. In the best of all possible worlds, clinicians would be familiar with how researchers define SLI and appreciate the value of research that attempts to identify distinct subgroups of children with developmental language disorders. Researchers, in this ideal world, would recognize and acknowledge the lack of congruence between the research populations of SLI and the larger clinical population of children with developmental language disorders.

Explaining individual differences in spelling ability.

This article considers the differences between good and poor spellers. The article is organized into four basic sections that consider the factors involved in learning to spell and the relationship between reading and spelling, spelling ability in good and poor readers, the good reader-poor speller

Metaphoric Competence in Children with Learning Disabilities

Metaphoric competence was examined in two groups of children with learning disabilities and one group of nondisabled peers ranging in age from 9-0 to 11-0 years. There were five girls and seven boys in each group. One group of students with learning disabilities had a history of spoken language impairment and the other group did not. Subjects were administered three verbal metaphor tasks (comprehension, preference, and completion) and a visual metaphor task, the Metaphor Triads Task (MTT). The three verbal metaphor tasks were administered in three contexts: (a) sentence, (b) story, and (c) story plus visual (pictorial) support. The group with a history of language impairment consistently performed more poorly on the metaphor tasks than the group without a history of language impairment, who, in turn, performed more poorly than the nondisabled children on all but the MTT. Context variations had no effect on childrens performance. Theoretical and clinical implications will be discussed.

Improving Clinical Practices for Children With Language and Learning Disorders

PURPOSE This lead article of the Clinical Forum addresses some of the gaps that exist between clinical practice and current knowledge about instructional factors that influence learning and language development. METHOD Topics reviewed and discussed include principles of learning, generalization, treatment intensity, processing interventions, components of language therapy, grammar goals, and goal prioritization for students with language and learning difficulties. CONCLUSION The gaps that exist between current knowledge about learning, language development, and clinical practice often do not receive as much attention as the gaps in the evidence base that addresses the efficacy and effectiveness of language intervention practices and service delivery models. Fortunately, clinicians do not have to wait for future intervention studies to apply their knowledge of learning and language development to clinical practices.

Factors That Influence Phoneme---Grapheme Correspondence Learning

The present study examined (a) the relative impact visual and phonetic factors have on learning phoneme–grapheme correspondences, and (b) the relationship between measures of visual and phonological processing and childrens ability to learn novel phoneme-grapheme correspondence pairs. Participants were 20 children with reading disabilities (RD), 10 normally achieving children matched for mental age (MA), and 10 children matched for reading age (RA). The children ranged in age from 5 years 2 months to 9 years 3 months. All children completed a phoneme–grapheme learning task consisting of four novel correspondence pairs, a visual processing task, and five measures of phonological processing. The MA and RA groups learned the four correspondence pairs in significantly fewer trials than the RD group. The RD group had the least difficulty learning the correspondence pair with different phonemes and graphemes and the most difficulty learning the correspondence pair with similar phonemes and graphemes. Performance on the learning task was significantly correlated to performance on the visual processing task and the five measures of phonological processing. Performance on the phonological processing task of short-term memory was the best predictor of overall performance on the learning task. Although children with RD were able to learn the four novel correspondence pairs, their processing deficiencies affected how readily they learned each of the correspondence pairs.

Response to Historical Perspective A Developmental Language Perspective

The strength of Richardsons historical perspective of dyslexia is that it illuminates some historical antecedents of dyslexia that may be unfamiliar to readers. Its weakness is that it fails to address the definitional issues associated with dyslexia. These issues are addressed in the present article. A definition of dyslexia is offered that considers the nature of the processing limitation that underlies the disorder as well as the developmental changes that occur in the manifestation of the disorder.