Clinical differentiation among children with initial language complaints.
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Comprehension of semantic concepts considered basic to academic performance in the early grades was evaluated with the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) for 15 orally trained, severely and profoundly hearing-imparied children, ages 13--14 years. The children also were required to construct written sentences using these same concepts. Teachers of the hearing-impaired children completed a questionnaire of their expectation levels of the vocabulary competence, comprehension, and production for each child on the 50 items of the BTBC. Classroom texts used by the children were examined for the presence of these specific concepts. The measure of comprehension showed that four-fifths of the children scored lower than the 10th percentile for second-grade hearing children, and two-thirds scored at or below the 1st percentile. Evaluating production, 68% of the sentences produced by the children contained semantic, syntactic, or semantic-syntactic errors. The individual's level of vocabulary comprehension was higher than each child's level of production. Classroom teachers were able to predict accurately each child's comprehension and production scores. Finally, the survey of the classroom textbooks used by the children revealed that approximately 80% of the BTBC test items appeared within the texts. Implications are discussed.
We estimate the prevalence of speech delay (L.D. Shriberg, D. Austin, B. A. Lewis, J. L. McSweeny, & D. L. Wilson, 1997b) in the United States on the basis of findings from a demographically representative population subsample of 1,328 monolingual English-speaking 6-year-old children. All children's speech and language had been previously assessed in the "Epidemiology of Specific Language Impairment" project (see J. B. Tomblin et al., 1997), which screened 7,218 children in stratified cluster samples within 3 population centers in the upper Midwest. To assess articulation, the Word Articulation subtest of the Test of Language Development-2: Primary (Newcomer & Hammill, 1988) was administered to each of the 1,328 children, and conversational speech samples were obtained for a subsample of 303 (23%) children. The 6 primary findings are as follows: (a) The prevalence of speech delay in 6-year-old children was 3.8%; (b) speech delay was approximately 1.5 times more prevalent in boys (4.5%) than girls (3.1%); (c) cross-tabulations by sex, residential strata, and racial/cultural backgrounds yielded prevalence rates for speech delay ranging from 0% to approximately 9%; (d) comorbidity of speech delay and language impairment was 1.3%, 0.51% with Specific Language Impairment (SLI); (e) approximately 11-15% of children with persisting speech delay had SLI; and (f) approximately 5-8% of children with persisting SLI had speech delay. Discussion includes implications of findings for speech-language phenotyping in genetics studies.
Hearing and receptive vocabulary (E.P.V.T. full-range version) of the trainees of an adult training centre have been studied. A high incidence of hearing loss (47.1 per cent) was found. The correlation between receptive vocabulary and hearing loss was significant at the five per cent level for the adult Down syndrome subjects in the study. Recommendations are made on the services required, particularly with reference to audiology, that could significantly contribute to the reduction in the number of hearing-impaired mentally handicapped subjects who are at present in hospital care.
To determine whether psychometric scatter is characteristic of the developmental profile of young autistic children, the performance of 38 autistic children, as measured by the Cattell, was compared with the performance of MA matched samples of normal, Down's Syndrome and non-Down's Syndrome children with mental retardation. Results indicated significantly more psychometric scatter in the autistic group than in the other groups. Similarly, 66% of the autistic children vs 13, 26 and 32% of the normal, Down's and non-Down's samples, respectively, had significant scatter. Further analyses revealed that autistic children showed consistent relative strength in non-language and weakness in language.
The Test de Vocabulaire en Images (the French version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) and the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale were administered to 44 persons with mental retardation who were aged 6.8 yr. to 18.2 yr. Analysis indicated a significant influence of chronological age on the Test de Vocabulaire en Images Mental Age. This influence of chronological age probably explains why receptive vocabulary tests consistently overestimate the IQ of persons with mental retardation.
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The preliminary studies on cerebral blood flow changes during neuropsychologic tests were carried out using transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD). The procedure with the standardized cerebral activation in order to obtain the control brain activity level was elaborated and tested. Blood flow velocity changes were measured during two groups of tests: linguistic with left dominant hemisphere and visual-spatial with right dominant hemisphere. Similar dynamics of blood flow changes was observed with all kinds of brain activation with the maximum velocity increase of 15-20%. The velocity measured in the dominant hemisphere was about 8-10% above the contralateral side. TCD seems to be complementary to the neuropsychologic tests useful especially in diagnosis of different types of dementia.
Regional cerebral metabolic rates for glucose (rCMRglc), as measured with positron emission tomography, and neuropsychological function were studied longitudinally (range, 15 to 48 months) in 11 mildly impaired patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and compared with results from patients with moderate and severe DAT and from controls. At initial evaluation, association cortex metabolic asymmetries were greater in patients with DAT than in controls for all dementia severities and correlated significantly with neuropsychological discrepancies between visuospatial and language abilities in patients with moderate dementia. In mildly impaired patients, right-left metabolic asymmetries in the association cortices were directionally stable and became more pronounced over time. At initial evaluation, these patients had significant impairment, relative to controls, on tests of memory and attention to complex tasks but not on tests of language and visuospatial function. Memory, attention, language, and visuospatial impairments, however, all worsened significantly over time. In mildly impaired patients, correlations between right-left metabolic asymmetries and neuropsychological discrepancies were insignificant initially but were significant at last evaluation. These results demonstrate that heterogeneous nonmemory language and visuospatial impairments in early DAT are related to and predicted by the earlier-appearing distribution of metabolic reductions in the association neocortex.
The development of 56 children at family risk of dyslexia was followed from the age of 3 years, 9 months to 8 years. In the high-risk group, 66% had reading disabilities at age 8 years compared with 13% in a control group from similar, middle-class backgrounds. However, the family risk of dyslexia was continuous, and high-risk children who did not fulfil criteria for reading impairment at 8 years performed as poorly at age 6 as did high-risk impaired children on tests of grapheme-phoneme knowledge. The findings are interpreted within an interactive model of reading development in which problems in establishing a phonological pathway in dyslexic families may be compensated early by children who have strong language skills.
In this paper, some developmental characteristics of a population of hearing-impaired children are described. The 79 children described are all those born in Greater Manchester in the years 1977-1980 with a mean bilateral sensorineural hearing loss of 25 dB HL or more in the better ear and without additional handicaps or bilingualism in the home. The subjects attended clinics in which comprehensive monitoring of their development was carried out by means of audiological, psychological and linguistic testing and video-recordings of mother-child interaction. In this cross-sectional study of their first clinic attendance at the ages of between 3 and 7, the measures used to define their levels of language ability and intelligence are described. As a means of dealing with the wide range of values, the children were blocked into groups according to their spontaneous language level and the results are reported groupwise.
The purposes of this paper are to discuss concepts that are fundamental to proper use of norm-referenced tests in clinical assessment, to consider common errors in the use of such tests, and to suggest alternatives to norm-referenced testing for certain assessment purposes. A hypothetical client is used to illustrate the following errors: the use of age-equivalent scores as the sole summary of test results, the use of individual items to formulate therapy objectives, and the failure to consider the possible effects of measurement error when difference scores are used to assess progress or to examine patterns of impairment.
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A semantic battery comprising items from living and nonliving categories was administered to a sample of subjects suffering from probable Alzheimer's type dementia (n=20). The results were analyzed to test the role of semantic distance in predicting group accuracy and its possible causal link with the phenomenon of a category-specific deficit for living things in the experimental population. Our findings confirm a category effect favoring nonliving items (over and above the role of confounding variables) in patients with Alzheimer's disease and support the major role of an imbalance of semantic distance in the testing material in the genesis of this phenomenon.
The Renfrew Word Finding Scale (Renfrew, 1988) was administered to 30 Indian (Group A) and 30 White (Group B) Durban English speaking children aged between eight and nine years to determine its suitability for assessment of expressive vocabulary. Mean scores for both groups were statistically compared to the British norms in terms of mean raw scores and mean mental age. Mean scores for groups A and B were compared to each other. Item analyses were carried out to obtain further information regarding possible lexical characteristics for each group and common problems with certain items. Both groups performed significantly poorer than expected according to the British norms. Group A was significantly lower than Group B, thus indicating the test's unsuitability for use with these population groups in its present form.
A total of 37 candidates for temporal lobe resection for epilepsy completed the Lateral Dominance Examination, a self-report instrument that measures hand and foot preference. Questionnaire results were compared with speech dominance, which had been determined by Intracarotid Sodium Amytal Procedure. Footedness was as good as handedness as a predictor of language laterality.
The study was designed to assess the speed and efficiency of visuospatial attentional orienting and the speed of visual processing and motor response in school-age children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). Fifteen participants with SLI (7-15 years old) and their gender- and age-matched normally developing peers performed two formats of a simple visual discrimination task, one requiring the use of attentional orienting for accurate performance, and the other not requiring shifts of attention. The SLI group was characterized by (a) slower visual processing, and (b) slower motor response, but (c) similar attentional orienting speed, relative to the control group. The results are discussed in relation to the 'generalized slowing hypothesis' in SLI and the neural underpinning of visuospatial attentional orienting and SLI.