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PubMed2000

All children are ready to learn: an emergent versus readiness perspective in early literacy assessment.

Assessment of emergent literacy is relatively new to the field of communication disorders. Traditional approaches to reading assessment evaluated mastery of reading readiness skills. By contrast, emergent literacy assessment evaluates the increased awareness and understanding of print that begin early in development. One of the most influential figures in emergent literacy assessment has been Marie M. Clay. She has defined critical components of emergent literacy and, in so doing, has played an integral role in the paradigm shift from a reading readiness to an emergent literacy perspective. This article is intended to distinguish emergent literacy from reading readiness, explicate Marie Clay's contribution to our current understanding of effective emergent literacy assessment, and provide some guidance in using her assessment techniques with children with significant disabilities.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1992

Verbal communication, nonverbal communication, and private speech in lower and middle socioeconomic status preschool children.

Three types of communication--verbal, nonverbal, and private speech--were investigated in 4- and 5-year-old children. Multiple analyses of variance (MANOVAs) without IQ controlled and multiple analyses of covariance (MANCOVAs) with IQ as a covariate were computed and followed by ANOVAs and ANCOVAs to determine the effects of sex, age, and socioeconomic status (SES) on each of these types of communication. The ANOVAs and the ANCOVAs yielded the same conclusions. Results indicated that age and SES, but not sex, influence the use of the three communication types. From age 4 to age 5, private speech decreased for middle SES children and remained the same for lower SES children. Although lower SES children had more nonverbal communication at both age levels than middle SES children, nonverbal communication decreased for middle SES children and increased for lower SES children between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Both lower and middle SES groups increased in verbal communication between the two ages. The middle SES 4-year-olds used more verbal communication than their lower SES counterparts, and the difference was maintained at age 5. Although IQ is related to verbal communication, statistically controlling for the effects of IQ did not change the conclusions.

Black or African American↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Pragmatic ability and disability as emergent phenomena.

A holistic approach to pragmatic ability and disability is outlined which takes account both of the behaviour of individuals involved in the communicative process, and also of the underlying factors which contribute to such behaviour. Rather than being seen as resulting directly from a dysfunction in some kind of discrete pragmatic "module" or behavioural mechanism, pragmatic impairment and also normal pragmatic functioning are instead viewed as the emergent consequence of interactions between linguistic, cognitive and sensorimotor processes which take place both within and between individuals.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

The syntax of questions in child English.

The purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary Government-and-Binding (GB) reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima & Bellugi's classic 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. I argue that the central insight of K&B's paper can be captured by positing that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer (C) position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (so blocking auxiliary inversion if this involves positioning an inverted auxiliary in C) and that in the transition to Adult English, children come to learn that wh-questions involve a wh-phrase superficially positioned in the specifier position within CP. I argue that the wh-in-C analysis poses both developmental problems (in that it fails to account for child structures involving a preposed wh-phrase with an uninverted auxiliary) and potential theoretical problems (in that long movement of a wh-head may violate locality principles). I then consider two alternative accounts of wh-questions which posit that wh-movement involves movement of a wh-phrase from the very earliest stages of development. The first of these is an adjunction account, on which wh-phrases are analysed as clausal adjuncts in Child English (adjoined to the Verb Phrase (VP) in the earliest stages and to the Inflection Phrase (IP) in later stages). I note, however, that this provides no principled account of the absence of auxiliary inversion in child wh-questions, and poses continuity problems (especially within a framework such as that of Cinque (1990) in which it is assumed that wh-phrases never adjoin to VP or IP). Finally, I consider an alternative account on which initial wh-phrases are analysed as occupying the specifier position within CP at all stages of development. I note that the problem posed by this analysis is accounting for the absence of auxiliary inversion in early wh-questions, and offer an account which posits that children overgeneralize specifier-head agreement from IP to CP.

Child Language↗
PubMed1993

An appearance-function shift in children's object naming.

The relative importance of appearance and potential function in children's object naming was examined. Potential function is an object capability that may not be currently realized (e.g. an empty mug has the potential to hold coffee). In Study 1, sixteen children from each of three age groups (3;8, 4;8, and 6;1) were taught novel names for unfamiliar objects; they then had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in either appearance or potential function. The youngsters were also shown deceptive objects (e.g., an eraser that looked like a pencil) and had to choose between familiar appearance and function names for them (e.g., pencil or eraser). The frequency of function-based responding in both tasks increased with age. In Study 2, the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis was given to both apparent and functional features. The main results of the first study were replicated. Neither study obtained evidence of a strong relation between the appearance-function shift and increased understanding of the appearance-reality distinction.

Child Language↗
PubMed1995

How shall a deceptive thing be called?

Thirty-six three-, four- and five-year-olds were asked to select labels for deceptive stimuli (e.g. for an eraser that looked like a pencil). Three types of labelling were investigated--simple (e.g. 'is an eraser'); appearance-predicated (e.g. 'looks like an eraser'); and reality-predicated (e.g. 'is really and truly an eraser'). An age-related appearance--reality shift was observed in simple labelling (e.g. older children were more likely than younger ones to accept eraser and reject pencil as simple names for the pencil-eraser). This trend was robust over method and semantic domain, though weaker with object than with colour labels. As in previous research, older children were more likely than younger ones to map different appearance- than reality-predicated labels onto an item (e.g. to accept that the pencil-eraser looks like a pencil, but is really and truly an eraser); however, all age groups were reluctant to extend more than one name to a stimulus via a common predicate (e.g. to accept two reality-predicated labels for the same object). This one-label-perpredicate pattern was observed more frequently within reality than within appearance predicates; more frequently with colour than with object names, and with questions blocked by predicate than by name. It is argued that younger children maintained this pattern because of inflexible encoding, but that older ones did so because of better understanding of the appearance-reality distinction, greater reality dominance, and a Mutual Exclusivity bias.

Child↗
PubMed1996

The development of syntactic subjects in Portuguese-speaking children.

In order to separate competence and performance factors in acquisition of knowledge of syntactic subjects, we audiotaped and analysed the spontaneous speech of 20 Portuguese-speaking two-year-olds in natural conversation with Portuguese-speaking adults. We separated the children into three groups based on Mean Length of Utterance in Words: 1.5-1.99; 2.0-2.99; 3.0-4.99. Our cross-sectional data demonstrated that Portuguese-speaking children increased their use of subjects from 28% in the lowest-MLUW group to 57% in the highest-MLUW group. The children in the highest-MLUW group almost perfectly matched the adult speakers in the study on every measure. The increase in children's use of subjects was primarily due to an increase in the use of pronominal subjects. A comparison between Portuguese- and English-speaking children suggests that adult competence about the status of subjects is present at the onset of combinatorial speech, as shown by differential production of subjects. Each group also experiences performance limitations, as shown by the increase in subject use as development proceeds.

Brazil↗
PubMed1998

Why is a pomegranate an apple? The role of shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge in children's overextensions of apple and dog.

Children's overextensions (e.g. referring to a pomegranate as apple) raise intriguing questions regarding early word meanings. Specifically, how do object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influence children's overextensions? The present study sheds new light on this issue by presenting items that disentangle the three factors of shape, taxonomic category, and prior lexical knowledge, and by using a novel comprehension task (the screened-alternative task) in which children can indicate negative exemplars (e.g. which items are NOT apples). 49 subjects in three age groups participated (Ms = 2;0, 2;6, and 4;5). Findings indicate: (1) Error patterns differed by task. In production, errors were overwhelmingly due to selecting items that matched the target word in BOTH shape and taxonomic relatedness. In comprehension, more errors were based on either shape alone or taxonomic relatedness alone, and the nature and frequency of the overextensions interacted with prior lexical knowledge. (2) Error patterns also differed markedly based on the word being tested (apple vs. dog), in both comprehension and production (3) As predicted, errors were more frequent in production than comprehension, though only for children in the two younger age groups. Altogether, the study indicates that overextensions are not simply production errors, and that both taxonomic relatedness and object shape play a powerful role in early naming errors.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1975

Articulatory inconsistencies in the speech of normal children.

The spontaneous speech of three children about three years old was recorded and transcribed into CnV syllabic units. Cn represents any number of consonants preceding a vowel and is not lexically constrained. Inconsistent production of /s/ and /z/ was found to be related to motor sequencing constraints independent of word boundaries. The results support a model of speech physiology as well as theoretical formulations of child speech production within an adult phonological system.

Child Language↗
PubMed1999

Use of technology in phonological assessment: evaluation of early meaningful speech and prelinguistic vocalizations.

Technologies that assist in the assessment of phonological abilities in early meaningful speech and prelinguistic vocalizations are discussed. Computerized assessment of phonological abilities (CAP) software offers significant time savings for basic analyses and makes possible the completion of more detailed analyses. The programs discussed in this article allow flexibility in determining not only the most appropriate analyses for an individual client, but also the design of the optimal symbol system for representing the client's productions. Case studies are included to illustrate the clinical benefits of CAP technology.

Age Factors↗