In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

The article, the sixth in a series discussing specific tests of the Detroit Tests of Learning Aptitude (DTLA), deals with verbal opposites (word meanings in isolation) and verbal absurdities (word meanings in context). (DLS)

Eleven autistic children, age 8-19, were administered a variation of the Stroop task which involved comprehending single words that differed along a concrete-abstract dimension and that exhibited varying amounts of interference. Both concrete and abstract words appeared as meaningful to autistic children as to reading-matched controls. (Author/JDD)

Guidelines are offered for speech-language pathologists who seek to evaluate and enhance idiom comprehension in language-disordered students. The long-term goal of the treatment approach is for the student to acquire a specific comprehension strategy for determining the meanings of unfamiliar idioms. (Author/JDD)

To create not a text-bound but a reader-based procedure for identifying global coherence within a discourse, five major writing tasks of 13 college students enrolled in a basic skills composition course were evaluated by three readers--doctoral students and faculty members in English and Reading Education. After choosing the five most and the five…

Designed to assess comprehension of written ambiguous and polysemous structures, this instrument is a series of written statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. In the first part of the test students are asked to identify (from a choice of three) semantically acceptable paraphrases for an initial sentence. Then students must…

On a picture vocabulary test, 42 hearing students performed better than 42 hearing-impaired students (ages 10-18) in selecting primary and secondary meanings of multimeaning words. Both groups chose primary meanings more often than secondary ones, and both groups' ability to select two meanings of words did not improve with age. (Author/JDD)

Arguing that the failure of instructional materials is frequently due to misconceptions held by their developers concerning the nature of comprehension, this chapter examines the factors involved in comprehension and relates them to the design of instructional materials. Three types of errors in comprehension are discussed, and ways to avoid them…

Presents a technique designed to help most readers' vocabulary grow with their every day reading. (JM)

Fifteen exercises are presented that are intended to increase reading comprehension in seventh and eighth graders via emphasis on word recognition, language comprehension (syntax and semantics), and reasoning skills (including inference, analogies, relationships, and direction following). (CL)

Suggests student writing exercises before, during, and after reading Shakespeare's Henry IV. Cites specific passages, followed by discussion and writing questions centered on the conflict between Henry IV and his son, a "generation gap" theme to which students can easily relate. (HTH)

Explains how semantic webbing (a process for constructing visual displays of categories and their relationships) works with a basal reader story and presents some teaching strategies for effective semantic webbing. (HOD)

Two articles look at effective practices with the learning disabled. The first, "Facilitating Mainstreaming through a School-Wide Study Skills Program" (Gayle Smith), stresses one skill each month. "Semantic Feature Analysis: An Interactive Teaching Strategy for Facilitating Learning from Text" (Candace Bos and Patricia Anders) offers a method for…

The study, involving 61 learning-disabled junior high students, compared the short-term and long-term effectiveness of definition instruction with interactive vocabulary strategies (semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, and semantic/syntactic feature analysis). Students participating in the interactive strategies demonstrated greater…

Although knowledge of multimeaning words is important for reading comprehension, deaf readers may know only the most common meanings or nuances of high-frequency multimeaning words. Results of a study are reported in which 33 profoundly hearing impaired students stratified into three equal age groups (ages 10, 11, and 12) were administered a…