Semantic Skills Research Articles

Predictors of MLU: semantic and morphological developments

In the past decade the existence of individual differences in both rate and route of language development has been widely accepted. Some between-child differences are observed in the synchro nization of morphological with semantic skills. These differences are obscured by portmanteau measures like MLU. The purpose of this paper is to explore semantic and morphological predictors of MLU in order to identify individual variation in language development in a fairly large number of typically developing children. To accomplish this goal, we identified two additional variables: NPSAT, a measure of morphological skill, and MLU cw, a measure of utterance length in content words. A growth modelling strategy was used to identify both 'within-child' and 'between-child' differences in longitudinal data from 36 children. We found that typically developing children indeed use different strategies in lengthening their utterances. We therefore recommend caution in the use of MLU to 'language match' children when doing research on early language development.

Optic Aphasia: A Case with Spared Action Naming and Associated Disorders

AG, a pure case of optic anomia (object naming impaired; action naming good) is described. We consider the fit of experimental data from AG to different theoretical accounts of optic aphasia. Overall, we find no evidence for impairments intrinsic to semantic representations, but we note a number of problems that we interpret as indicating a slight, and specific, weakness in semantic access from vision. We also note a mild problem in generating names to a cue (verbal fluency). The main aim of the report was to provide a full description of tests of visual, semantic, and speech output skills in this patient in relation to the processing of visually presented objects and scenes, within a sequential information processing account which enables some theoretical implications to be drawn, albeit not conclusively.

Item Priming and Skill Learning in Amnesia

This study employed a semantic decision-making task to examine both item priming and skill learning in amnesia, which traditionally have been demonstrated with separate tasks. Fourteen amnesic patients of mixed etiologies and 14 normal control subjects judged whether words represented animate or inanimate objects. One list was presented repeatedly on four continuous blocks of trials, and a new list was presented on the fifth block. For both groups, decision times decreased significantly from Block 1 to Block 5 (indicating skill acquisition) and increased significantly from Block 4 to Block 5 (indicating item-specific learning). The amnesic patients demonstrated a normal rate of skill learning, but a reduced magnitude of item priming. As expected, the amnesics had significantly impaired explicit memory of the implicitly learned items, as measured by recognition accuracy. The results suggest that both implicit and explicit learning of individual items is impaired in amnesia, despite normal semantic skill learning.

A prospective study of the relationship between phonological, semantic and syntactic skills and specific reading disability

Although it is well established that a relationship exists between specific reading disability and spoken language difficulties, the nature of that relationship remains controversial. In the study reported here, the performance of poor readers was firstly compared with that of matched good readers on a series of spoken and written language tasks on three assessment trials 12 months apart, and secondly to that of younger average readers. Five experimental tasks were used to measure the readers' phonological processing skills, and three subtests from the CELF-R were selected to measure the students' syntactic and semantic skills. Reading accuracy and comprehension ability were assessed by the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability-Revised. The results showed that 8–10-year-old poor readers performed poorly in all three linguistic areas concurrently, and that these difficulties persisted. However, the important finding from this study was that while the good readers demonstrated no significant difference between their phonological processing skills and their semantic/syntactic skills, the poor readers' ability did differ according to skill area. The poor readers' phonological processing skills appeared to be particularly impaired, a finding which was further enhanced by results from the reading-match comparison. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of reading disability.

The connection between phonological, syntactic and semantic skills and children’s reading and spelling

In recent years two radically different views have dominated discussions about the way in which children learn to read and write. The first view is that the crucial hurdle in learning to read is the discovery of how to do the correct phonological analysis. The second view is that the crucial factor is the use of context, and that children use what they know about the meaning — and particularly the semantics and the syntax — of the passages that they are reading to help them decipher and learn about difficult written words. Learning to read is ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’ according to this view and children set about it in much the same way as they set about learning to speak. Thus according to the first view children’s semantic and syntactic skills will determine their progress in reading and according to the second it will be their phonological skills. We present longitudinal evidence about a group of children in their first year at school which shows that both kinds of skill do play a part, but that they make entirely different contributions. Semantic and syntactic skills determine how well children make use of the context of what they are reading. Phonological skills affect their use of letter-sound relationships.

The Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic Skills of Children with Specific Reading Disability

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between spoken language skills and specific reading disability. The performance of twenty 8 to 10 year old poor readers was compared to that of matched “good” readers on a series of tasks assessing phonological, syntactic and semantic processing skills. Significant group differences were found between the “good” and “poor” readers on all tasks, with the poor readers' performance being inferior. However the mean difference between group performances on total phonological tasks was greater than the mean difference on the total semantic/syntactic tasks. These results provide further evidence that a variety of linguistic deficits are associated with specific reading disability in older children, and that phonological processing skills may be the language domain that is most discriminatory. The teaching implications of these findings are discussed.

Conversational Skills in Closed Head Injury: Part 1

Traditional studies have focussed on the semantic, syntactic and phonological skills of individuals with Closed Head Injury (CHI) and indicated that these skills recover to a sufficient level for conversation. The conversational skills of individuals with CHI have been mentioned in many studies but no study has provided a detailed overview of the types of conversational errors which might be found. In addition, the types of tasks used to collect the conversational data and the system of analysis may influence the types of “errors” identified. This study, the first in a series, attempted to provide a general description of the types of conversational errors in CHI. Eleven adults aged between 16;0–40;0 were involved in a series of conversational tasks to collect samples. The tasks included: answering questions, picture description, relating a self-generated account of a memorable experience, describing sequences and answering a series of open-ended questions. All tasks were audiotaped. Conversations were tr...

Class inclusion and working memory

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the general issue of the relationship between memory and reasoning and the specific issue of subskills used in answering class-inclusion questions. Semantic skills of first-grade children were investigated in the Pilot Experiment. In Experiment 1, an attempt was made to determine if fourth graders, seventh graders, and college students mimicked the first graders tendency to appropriately encode the superordinate class, but answer class-inclusion questions as though only subclass comparisons were required. A mathematical model and a computer-based methodology were developed for this purpose. Unlike previous research, in Experiment 1 fourth and seventh graders showed no understanding of class-inclusion logic. Because of the additional memory demands imposed by the questions used in Experiment 1, a third experiment was conducted to evaluate if memory load determined the quality of class-inclusion reasoning. The results obtained across the three experiments were interpreted as reflecting the need for a new conceptualization of the class-inclusion task. Performance seems to be dependent on subjects' abilities to integrate relevant subskills, rather than on deficient reasoning or missing subskills, consistent with a resource-limited, willed-attention, working-memory model.

Dialogue and the search for information

Knowledge of conversation theory and speech acts assists us to understand how people search for information. Dialogue embodies meanings and intentionalities, and represents epistemic inquiry. There are implications for the information‐processing model of cognitive psychology. Question formulation (erotetics) and turn‐taking play important roles in eliciting information, while discourse analysis furnishes us with information about people's categorising, recall, and semantic skills.

A Later Look at Borderline and Mildly Retarded Preschoolers

A group of 38 preschool children, first evaluated when 2 to 4 years old, functioning within the borderline or mildly retarded ranges of intelligence, were reevaluated at the ages of 6 or 7 years. It was found that cognitive and linguistic limitations remained fairly stable over time. The most global of the early measures best predicted subsequent attainment, both for children with language skills significantly below performance and for those with more even function. Preschool language deficiencies reflected in a significant discrepancy between verbal and performance abilities in early intelligence testing were not subsequently associated with greater academic difficulties. At the time of reevaluation, receptive understanding of language exceeded expressive competence, and semantic skills were stronger than syntactic abilities.

Semantic development and communicative skills in different social classes∗

Lower‐class school children were found to be less effective in referential communications than middle‐class children. The attempt of this study was to explain this gap as a matter of linguistic dev...

Validity of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test for Learning-Disabled Children

This study examined the concurrent and construct validity of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) vis-à-vis the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Revised (PPVT-R), the Similarities and Vocabulary subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), and the Auditory Reception and Auditory Association subtests of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA). The subjects were 97 learning-disabled students (age range = 72-143 months) in the Honolulu area who were administered all tests as part of a multidisciplinary psychoeducational evaluation. The results indicated that the EOWPVT had acceptable concurrent validity, but the construct validity of the test was questionable. The EOWPVT scores were also found to be consistently higher than the PPVT-R scores. Implications for the assessment of learning-disabled children's expressive and receptive semantic skills are discussed.

Visual problem solving in the absence of lexical semantics: Evidence from dementia

A case of dissociation between visual and praxic skills and linguistic, referential, and semantic skills is described in a case of dementia. Testing revealed that her visual processing was intact and that she was capable of a wide range of visually based tasks. These included copying geometric figures and block designs; matching items on the basis of number, color, or relative size, matching upper and lower case letters, sequencing numerals, orienting pictures, coins, and letters appropriately, and solving problems based on the identification of geometric patterns or on the identification of logical sequences based on pattern alternation, number, and size increases. In contrast, she was completely incapable of matching pictures on the basis of their semantic or referential meaning; similarly she had lost all comprehension of language. It was argued that this case demonstrates the capacities of a visual system cut off from all symbolic and semantic processes. When examined with other case studies this case provides information about the nature of and interaction between modality-specific perceptual processing and semantic processing, and information about the various cognitive factors involved in visual gnosis. The CT scan indicated frontal atrophy and marked anterior temporal atrophy, a pattern that is consistent with Pick's disease. The case was discussed in terms of the correlation between the pattern of observed strengths and deficits and the neurological pattern of atrophy.

Influence of acoustical and linguistic factors on the SPIN test difference score

SPIN test difference scores, which are the numeric difference between items of high predictability and low predictability, were obtained from three groups of subjects to determine whether the subject’s language skills influenced the size of the difference score. For this purpose the relationship between the difference score and the following variables was determined: syntactic skills, semantic skills, IQ, age, hearing loss, and signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). Results indicated that the difference scores were significantly related to the subject’s hearing and the S/N ratio used in the administration of the SPIN sentences. Possible reasons for these results are discussed.

Processing and Memory Factors in Children's Reading Comprehension Skill

HESS, THOMAS M., and RADTKE, ROBERT C. Processing and Memory Factors in Children's Reading Comprehension Skill. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 479-488. The roles of verbal coding skills, processing efficiency, and memory ability in accounting for individual and developmental differences in reading comprehension skill were examined. Measures of automatic processing of phonological information, name retrieval, reading time, memory scanning efficiency, memory span for letter strings of high and low approximation to English, and story recall were obtained for children in grades 3-8. Regression and multivariate statistical methods were used to examine the influence of these measures on skill within a theoretical model of comprehension. Initial analyses indicated that semantic coding skills, scanning speed of working memory contents, and span low all accounted for significant skill variance. Further multivariate analyses suggested that coding and scanning speed were related to general processing efficiency and that some general memory ability factor, which differed across skill levels, was affecting performance on all 3 memory tasks. These results indicate that skill differences can arise through ability differences at 2 independent levels-processing speed and memoryand that general factors might be more important predictors of skill than specific operations.