Poor Verbal Skills Research Articles

Verbal Skills, Finger Tapping, and Cognitive Tempo Define a Second-Order Factor of Temporal Information Processing

Adolescents with academic and social problems are often characterized as impulsive, having poor verbal skills, and having poor motor coordination. Language and skilled movements have long been hypothesized to share a common neural basis. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that verbal skills, fine motor tasks that require a continuous sequential response, and cognitive tempo (impulsiveness, time judgment) would interrelate to define a higher-order dimension of “temporal information processing.” Subjects were 155 males of high school age. The results confirmed the basic hypothesis.

Reflections on Religion: Aging, Belief Orthodoxy, and Interpersonal Conflict in the Complexity of Adult Thinking about Religious Issues

In this study, the integrative complexity of reasoning about three different types of religious issues was examined in a sample of 60 adults across the lifespan. Men and women, aged 18-26, 27-45, and 60-85, were asked about their current beliefs, justifications, and views on alternative positions regarding a personally conflictful religious issue of their own report, a personally nonconflictful issue, and a standard dilemma involving evolutionist versus creationist accounts of human origins. Results showed that older adults reasoned less complexly than did their younger counterparts in all three types of religious dilemmas. As predicted, personally conflictful dilemmas were discussed in a more complex fashion than were other types of dilemmas across age groups, suggesting that external dialogue about issues is linked to more sophisticated mental structures of argumentation. A summary regression analysis showed that those who were older, more orthodox, reported less religious reflection, and had poorer verbal skills, displayed less complex religious reasoning overall.

Relations among verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills in normal language and specifically language-impaired children

This study tested the hypothesis that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children have a qualitatively different cognitive system from that of normal language (NL) children. Twenty NL and 20 SLI children between the ages of 4:2 (years: months) and 5:11 were presented with experimental language-learning measures, experimental nonverbal measures, and verbal and nonverbal norm-referenced tests. A confirmatory analysis of the covariance matrix structures of the two subject groups indicated that relations among cognitive skills differed between NL and SLI children. In addition, a planned comparison indicated that the relation between nonverbal rule-induction and novel bound-morpheme learning differed significantly between groups. The findings indicate that a “qualitative-differences” model of specific language impairment better accounts for the co-occurrence of poor verbal and poor nonverbal cognitive skills in SLI children than a “low-normal” model.

Efficacy of Edwards' Cognitive Shift Approach to Art Education

This experimental evaluation of the art education techniques proposed by Betty Edwards compared the post treatment drawing performance of volunteers randomly assigned to three groups: an Edwards' training procedure group (n= 19), a placebo control group (n= 18), and a waiting-list control group (n= 16). A one-way analysis of variance revealed that the experimental Edwards' and placebo control procedures were equally effective in promoting improved drawing performance, and that both treatments were more effective than no treatment. Implications for the neuropsychological training rationale offered by Edwards and for future research on techniques to improve drawing are discussed. In recent years, educators have been exhorted to apply new neuropsychological findings to foster better learning (Bogen, 1975; Bogen & Bogen, 1969; Garrett, 1976; Levy, 1983; Ornstein, 1977). Preliminary research on functional differences between the left and right hemispheres was used to promote a seductively simple lay view of brain activity and equally simplistic educational applications. For example, various neuropsychologically naive techniques have been proposed to exploit the forgotten right hemisphere's talents. This is consistent with a popular, oversimplified view of hemisphere action, which portrays the two sides of the brain as competitively performing discrete sets of functions. Analysis of many popular applications of the simplified picture of hemispheric specialization reveals a disturbing circularity. Traditional educational practices are indicted on grounds that they instruct only half the brain (the verbal, analytical left hemisphere) and place students who are naturally more right hemisphere inclined at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, the same behaviors purportedly explained by differential right hemisphere activity (e.g., academic failure, poor verbal skills) are also frequently used to operationalize the construct. A student's poor class performance is attributed to failure to utilize the left hemisphere adequately, which is suspected because of the presence of poor class performance. Few practitioners ever bother to measure neurological variables directly. Much of this applied work can be faulted on grounds that it confuses explanation with mere description. Reference to neurological variables provides a veneer of mystery and scientific credibility, which masks the minimal contribution to understanding actually made by this cerebral assymmetry analysis. It appears at times that enthusiasm for pragmatism has outstripped patience for experimental evaluation. A scarcity of controlled outcome studies now plagues this area. Proponents of techniques designed to enhance performance by better tapping hemispheric potentials conveniently overlook the possibility