Roy A. Koenigsknecht

Tapping the Lexical Store of the Adult Aphasic: Analysis of the Improvement Made in Word Retrieval Skills

Summary In this study, four aphasics who had obvious word-finding difficulties were drilled over a period of 18 therapy sessions on 20 of 40 words each patient failed to retrieve, on a pre-therapy confrontation naming test. No work was devoted to the other 20 words. At the conclusion of each 6 sessions, the patients were retested on the 20 drilled and, 20 non-drilled words. Though there was some inter-subject variability, all showed essentially the same pattern of improvement. During the course of therapy patients showed not only significant improvement in their ability to retrieve words drilled on in therapy, but they also responded correctly and with reduced latency of response to the non-drilled items. Improvement was noted also on non-drilled items outside the superordinate categories from which drill words were selected. These data support the argument that in amnesic aphasia there is no reduction in the lexical store itself; but rather an impairment of the ability to retrieve bits of information from the lexical store. Therapy is viewed as a mechanism for improving the general retrieval process and not a setting for teaching vocabulary via rote memorization.

Syntax Development in Boys and Girls.

KOENIGSKNECHT, ROY A., and FRIEDMAN, PHILIP. Syntax Development in Boys and Girls. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 1109-1115. The Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) procedure was used to collect normative information about the syntax development of male and female children. Verbal samples in response to a variety of stimulus materials were collected from 20 male and 20 female normally developing children at 5 age levels (2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years). On several measures of sentence length and syntax maturity, girls averaged significantly higher scores than boys. Specific grammatical categories were also identified as important sex discriminators at different age levels. Significant female advantages began showing at the 4-year-old level, and became more evident with increasing age.

Biracial Testing: The Question of Clinicians' Influence on Children’s Test Performance

Six speech and language clinicians, three black and three white, administered the Goodenough Drawing Test (1926) to 144 preschoolers. The four groups, lower socioeconomic black and white and middle...