The primary objective was to compare the grammatical output of children with language disorders on different tasks. Sixty-five children with language disorders, aged six to eleven, completed the syntactic formulation (elicitation) and narrative subtests from the Assessment of Comprehension and Expression 6-11 (Adams et al. 2001). Grammatical…

A weakness in accessing the sounds of spoken language represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability in young school age children and adolescents. Neurological science and reading research that provides the scientific knowledge regarding this disability is presented.

A deep, developmental construct and definition of fluency, in which fluency and reading comprehension have a reciprocal relationship, is explicated and contrasted with superficial approaches to that construct. The historical development of fluency is outlined, along with conclusions of the U.S. National Reading Panel, to explore why fluency has…

The study investigated whether changes in the educational context of teaching Arabic as a second language in Israeli schools affect students' attitudes towards the language, its speakers and culture, and motivation to study the language. These changes included teaching spoken Arabic rather than Modern Standard Arabic and lowering the starting age…

This study examined strategies for initiating social interactions with peers, among 4 children with hearing impairment, aged 33 to 36 months, attending a special early education center or a regular kindergarten. The study investigated initiation type (related to partner's hearing status) and rates of initiation success/failure vis-a-vis hearing…

Sign language in the Arab World has been recently recognized and documented. Many efforts have been made to establish the sign language used in individual countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and the Gulf States, by trying to standardize the language and spread it among members of the Deaf community and those concerned. Such efforts produced…

In this paper we present a case of "word-meaning deafness," characterised by serious problems in the comprehension of spoken language, whilst repetition and writing words and non-words from dictation are preserved. This performance indicates the impossibility of correctly accessing phonological representation from the semantic representation of…

Effects on spoken-word recognition of prevoicing differences in Dutch initial voiced plosives were examined. In 2 cross-modal identity-priming experiments, participants heard prime words and nonwords beginning with voiced plosives with 12, 6, or 0 periods of prevoicing or matched items beginning with voiceless plosives and made lexical decisions…

The intelligibility of conversational speech produced by six children fitted with cochlear implants before age 3 years was measured longitudinally. Samples were obtained every 3 months during periods of 12-21 months. Intelligibility was measured using both an utterance-by-utterance approach and an approach to the sample as a whole. Statistically…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth…

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (ACTFL, 1982; 1986; Breiner-Sanders et al.,2000) and the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) derived from them have stimulated abundant and sustained professional engagement by foreign language teachers at all levels and in all languages, as well as intense and equally sustained criticism by specialists in foreign…

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. Garcia-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate…

This study compared the oral structure and oral-motor skills of 59 boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), 34 boys with Down syndrome (DS), and 36 developmentally similar typically developing (TD) boys. An adaptation of the J. Robbins and T. Klee (1987) Oral Speech Motor Protocol was administered to participants and their scores on measures of oral…

This paper presents two nine-year-old children who used different oral, written, visual, and digital modes as resources to create meaning and to position themselves socially through multimodal stories. Their diverging experiences with technology as a resource for storytelling draw attention to the importance of studying "the ways that old and new…