Lynn S. Snyder

Helping Children Tell What Happened: A Follow-Up Study of the Narrative Elaboration Procedure

In cases of child maltreatment, children are required to recount past experiences in pretrial interviews, courtroom examination, and abuse-focused therapy. Yet their descriptions are often insufficient for risk assessment, legal decision making, and treatment planning. In the present study, we test whether a new procedure—narrative elaboration—facilitates childrens recall without jeopardizing accuracy. Thirty-three second graders participated in a classroom activity. Two weeks later, they were randomly assigned to participate in one of two preparation sessions before being interviewed about the classroom activity: (a) narrative elaboration intervention or (b) control session. The interviewer was an unfamiliar authority figure. The interview entailed free recall (e.g., “What happened?”), cued recall (i.e., an opportunity to elaborate on free recall with visual cues), and follow-up questions. On the cued recall task, children prepared with the narrative elaboration procedure reported significantly more correct information than children in the control group. Performance was improved without increasing error or reducing correct responses to follow-up questions. The implications of these results for questioning suspected child abuse victims are discussed.

Serial Rapid Naming Skills in Children with Reading Disabilities.

This study compared the performance of children with reading disability (RD) and normal reading achievement (NRA) on tasks of serial rapid naming, verbal fluency, letter-based word retrieval, and articulatory speed. The groups, composed of children at two discrete age levels, one younger and one older, were matched for age, gender, and neighborhood school. Analyses of the on-line measurement of the children’s serial rapid naming indicated that the children with RD had significantly larger reaction times and production durations than their NRA peers despite similar levels of accuracy. They also performed significantly worse on the categorical verbal fluency task, the letter-based word retrieval task, and the test of articulatory speed. The findings suggest that both access and post-access processes, such as oral-motor inefficiency that extends the duration of word production, may be implicated in the slower serial rapid naming that has typified many samples of children with RD.

Theory and Pedagogical Practices of Text Comprehension

This article reports on the reading comprehension crisis of older students in the middle and high school grades in our nation. Its goal is to establish a common foundation for intervention by educators and clinicians alike, by providing a brief description of the state of the field in comprehension theory. In particular, the Kintsch construction–integration theory of comprehension is described in the context of its place in the history of memory and learning research. Finally, promising practical classroom applications that result from this model are presented.

The Assessment of Reading Comprehension: Considerations and Cautions

This article discusses the main purposes of reading comprehension assessment and identifies the key features of good assessment. The article also identifies pitfalls that clinicians and educators should avoid to conduct valid assessments of reading comprehension, such as the degree to which the measure taps the constructive and integrative processes of reading comprehension, the effects of socioeconomic and cultural–linguistic differences on student performance, and sampling variation. Lastly, it discusses recent technological innovations to the assessment of reading comprehension, including 2 specific computer-supported tools, Measures of Academic Progress and Independent Comprehensive Adaptive Reading Evaluation.

Developmental Differences in the Relationship between Oral Language Deficits and Reading.

This article examines the influence that oral language deficits may exert on childrens ability to learn to read and to develop mature reading skills. Recent research documents deficits in phonological awareness, rapid naming, syntactic and morphological skills, and discourse processing and production in samples of children of different ages who have poor reading skills. Although deficits in expressive syntax and morphology can be observed in young children and some samples of children with reading delays, the majority of the evidence points to deficient phonological awareness as the variable that best discriminates children with reading delay. These deficits endure through young adulthood and continue to limit a students reading rate, despite the development of satisfactory compensatory strategies. Among the different types of language deficits that can be observed at different points across the age span in poor readers, a phonological core deficit seems to be the most prominent and enduring oral language deficit in children and young adults who struggle with reading.

Children's Courtroom Narratives: Competence, Credibility, and the Communicative Contract.

This article addresses the manner in which the communicative contract is executed within the narrative recount context of the courtroom. The ways in which courtroom narratives can violate commonly held communicative assumptions, such as the conversational postulates of sincerity and information, are discussed as well as the ways in which these may affect the perceived competence and credibility of child witnesses. The effects of childrens development of comprehension monitoring skills and a theory of mind on their ability to give competent eyewitness testimony are also examined.