Investigates three types of cues [semantic, syntactic (intensional), and adjacency] to subjects of verbs in English sentences. Finds that, when the adjacency strategy does not apply, even highly literate native speakers have great difficulty in correctly comprehending subject-verb correspondences. Discusses findings in context of the relationship…

Describes a project-driven classroom that elaborates on the conventional role play, implementing the instructional goals of the National Standards in Foreign Language Education project, while presenting possible solutions to the issue of listening-comprehension anxiety. (Author/VWL)

Considers first graders' comprehension-monitoring skills related to their decoding and listening comprehension skills. Concludes that monitoring one's comprehension is already present in beginning reading but that the level of decoding and listening-comprehension skills affects the way and efficacy of monitoring. (SC)

This study investigated success in responding to naturalistic conversational questions by six young adults with autism, using a quantitative discourse analytic method. Four types of questions were identified: more than seven words in length; multiclausal; requiring inference; and indirect requests for information. The prediction that…

Describes the design and implementation of a computer-based listening test--the "Text dictation." The article first discusses the importance of listening centering on a coherent text, rather than short listening fragments, and discusses drawbacks of listening programs wherein the required responses consist of noninteractive test types, such as…

Seeks to determine whether it is possible to teach children who are poor readers four text comprehension strategies (clarifying, questioning, summarizing, and predicting) in listening contexts. Demonstrates that it is possible to teach the strategies to poor readers; that they can improve their reading comprehension; and that listening…

This study compared verbal comprehension, verbal production, and gesture production in 40 children (ages 10-49 months) with Down Syndrome (DS) and 40 normally developing children (ages 8-17 months). DS children showed a dissociation between verbal comprehension and production but synchronous development between vocal lexical comprehension and…

Two experiments examined the sensitivity of children (ages 3 to 5) with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children to grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs. Findings indicated that the children with SLI were sensitive to grammatical morphemes, and that comprehension failure may reflect short-term…

Cross-validates the Simple View of Reading using a sample of children with English as their first language. Support the idea that reading comprehension ability can be decomposed into decoding and listening comprehension abilities, but does not support the assumption that most of the substantive variance in reading comprehension can be explained by…

Offers a cognitive perspective on the comprehension problems of second language listeners by identifying real-time listening difficulties faced by English-as-Second-Language learners and examining these difficulties within the three-phase model of language comprehension proposed by Anderson (1995). Shows ten problems that occurred during the…

The purpose of the present study is twofold: the first objective is to evaluate the importance of visual experience for the ability to form a spatial representation (spatial mental model) of fairly elaborate spatial descriptions. Secondly, we examine whether blind people exhibit the same preferences (i.e. level of performance on spatial tasks) as…

The purpose of this investigation was to document performance of participants wearing a cochlear implant and hearing aid in opposite ears on speech-perception and localization tests. Twelve individuals who wore a cochlear implant and a hearing aid on contralateral ears were tested on their abilities to understand words in quiet and sentences in…

The two experiments reported here investigated the ability of sighted children and children with visual impairment to comprehend text and, in particular, to draw inferences both while reading and while listening. Children were assigned into "comprehension skill" groups, depending on the degree to which their reading comprehension skill was in line…

This study explored the comprehension and production of sentences derived by syntactic movement, in orally trained school-age Hebrew-speaking children with moderate to profound hearing impairment, aged 7;8?9;9 years. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses and topicalization sentences (with word orders of OVS [object,…

The purpose of this study was to compare listener processing demands when decoding alaryngeal compared to laryngeal speech. Fifty-six listeners were presented with single words produced by 1 proficient speaker from 5 different modes of speech: normal, tracheosophageal (TE), esophageal (ES), electrolaryngeal (EL), and synthetic speech (SS).…