Susan Edwards

This paper investigates the development of phonological awareness in Greek deaf children. A battery of phonological awareness tasks that assessed syllable, rhyme and phoneme awareness was administered to one group of deaf preschoolers (n = 13, CA = 5;9), one group of deaf children in primary school (n = 11, CA = 7;8) and two hearing comparison groups. The results showed that deaf preschoolers did not have phonological awareness at any linguistic level. After an average of 21 months of literacy instruction, deaf children had developed syllable awareness.

The way in which aphasic speech is characterized depends 013 the purpose of that characterization and the discipline involved. Until recently, clinical work with aphasics has been dependent on the traditional medical model where assessme: nt of aphasia has ...

Conversation therapies employing video for feedback and to facilitate outcome measurement are increasingly used with people with post-stroke aphasia and their conversation partners; however the evidence base for change in everyday interaction remains limited. We investigated the effect of Better Conversations with Aphasia (BCA), an intervention that is freely available online at https://extend.ucl.ac.uk/. Eight people with chronic agrammatic aphasia, and their regular conversation partners participated in the tailored 8 week program involving significant video feedback. We explored changes in: (i) conversation facilitators (such as multi-modal turns by people with aphasia); and (ii) conversation barriers (such as use of test questions by conversation partners). The outcome of intervention was evaluated directly by measuring change in video-recorded everyday conversations. The study employed a pre-post design with multiple 5 minute samples of conversation before and after interventio...

ABSTRACTThe present study compared production and on-line comprehension of definite articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns in Greek-speaking typically developing, sequential bilingual (L2-TD) children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (L1-SLI). Twenty Turkish Greek L2-TD children, 16 Greek L1-SLI children, and 31 L1-TD Greek children participated in a production task examining definite articles and clitic pronouns and, in an on-line comprehension task, involving grammatical sentences with definite articles and clitics and sentences with grammatical violations induced by omitted articles and clitics. The results showed that the L2-TD children were sensitive to the grammatical violations despite low production. In contrast, the children with SLI were not sensitive to clitic omission in the on-line task, despite high production. These results support a dissociation between production and on-line comprehension in L2 children and for impaired gra...

The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS) is a new, fourth edition of a widely-used assessment for identifying speech and language delay and impairment in young children and is designed for administration by speech and language therapists. NRDLS provides an assessment of key features of language and has been revised, improved and newly standardised on more than 1,200 children aged 2 years to 7 years 5 months in the UK. The revisions to the new edition have been based on recent research on child language acquisition and indicators of language impairment, together with user feedback. There are two scales in the NRDLS: one explores aspects of a child’s understanding of selected vocabulary items and grammatical features (the Comprehension Scale); and the other examines the child’s production of the same features of language (the Production Scale). Parallel sections within the scales aid comparison of a child’s comprehension and production skills. A highlight of the new edition is The Multilingual Toolkit. The Multilingual Toolkit has been produced to help adapt the concepts and materials of NRDLS to situations where there is linguistic diversity and to give guidance on how to adapt and use NRDLS with children for whom English is an additional language (EAL). It illustrates the sorts of adaptations that could be made, uses examples to indicate what an individual child’s performance might mean for assessment and also offers advice on adapting instructions, taking account of cultural differences and taking account of differences in experience and language input across cultures and linguistic groups.

Problematic trace-antecedent relations between deep and surface structure have been a dominant theme in sentence comprehension in agrammatism. We challenge this view and propose that the comprehension in agrammatism in declarative sentences and wh-...

Subjects with Broca's aphasia have been shown to display difficulties in on-line and off-line tasks involving personal pronouns and reflexives. Off-line tasks have indicated more errors with pronouns than with reflexives while the reverse has been found in on-line studies. In ...

The Reynell Developmental Language Scales III have been designed to test the language abilities of children from 18 months to 7 years. They have been standardized on a large, representative sample of children in the United Kingdom and thereby provide a robust measure of language achievement. These Scales provide clinicians with the means of comparing the performance of children who have been referred for therapy, or who are in therapy, with the performance of a large group of normally developing children. The Scales reflect the developmental progression of normal child language in the early years, focusing on key features of child language acquisition at different stages as well as on features which are known to distinguish language impaired-children from language-normal children. While not claiming that the tests are fully comprehensive, the authors maintain that they afford the clinician with a means of looking at components of language while also gaining some insights into the child's ability to integrate vocabulary and grammar. It is recognized that no test can fully assess every aspect of language; essentially a test must be practical in terms of design and, for screening purposes, sufficiently comprehensive to be used with a large section of children referred. In addition to fulfilling these criteria, the Scales have been designed to provide some diagnostic indicators of areas of difficulty. The aims of the original Scales were to provide a measure of verbal ability that could be compared with mental age, and to provide separate scores for production and comprehension. These aims have also been realized in the new version. Additionally a test has been provided that is consonant with information gained from the intensive research in the field of child language that has taken place since the original Scales were devised. The Scales can reveal information about a child's language abilities not readily available from observation and serve a useful function in both identifying disorder and evaluating therapy. Clinicians are increasingly being asked to demonstrate effectiveness of therapy but are hampered by inappropriate outcome measures (Law 1997). It is hoped that the RDLS III provides a test that is valid and reliable and one that can contribute to both the characterization of speech and language disorders and the measurement of treatment efficacy.

Summary Sixty-two dysphasic patients were tested on the Matrices, the Schuell and a measure of communication ability. The non-verbal intelligence of these subjects as tested by Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices was at about the average level despite their language ...