Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

The year-long case study described in this article examined the transactions between a sixth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. O'Reilly, and a struggling reader within her classroom, Sarah, in relation to the reading-task demands of their classroom. Findings indicated that Mrs. O'Reilly's transactions with Sarah were influenced by a cognitive,…

An evaluation of the sentence verification technique (an experimental test of listening and reading comprehension) found that 19 seventh grade poor comprehenders' performances on subtests of the experimental test were significantly below those of 41 good comprehenders, and 94.6 percent of the good and poor comprehenders were classified correctly.…

"Profiles in Listening and Reading" is presented as a screening test assessing listening and reading comprehension of extended discourse, based on the sentence verification technique. A study of 60 seventh graders and another study of 166 fourth, sixth, and eighth graders show some promise for the test's validity and diagnostic usefulness.…

A reevaluation of a previous study which found a significant improvement in speechreading scores of 15 normal hearing adults following a word-scoring training intervention found that, though subjects increased verbal output and mean length of utterance, they did not improve sentence comprehension, syntactic correctness, or overall response…

To explore whether different balances of fiction/non-fiction reading and challenge might help explain differences in reading achievement between genders, data on 45,670 pupils who independently read over 3 million books were analysed. Moderate (rather than high or low) levels of challenge were positively associated with achievement gain, but…

The differential effects of normal and emphatic stress on the auditory comprehension performance of nine aphasic and five normal adults were assessed. The aphasic subjects demonstrated significantly better performance for stimuli presented with emphatic stress. (Author/DB)

A 2-microphone dereverberation technique was evaluated by obtaining speech recognition measures and preference judgments from 10 normal-hearing adults and 7 older adult hearing-impaired listeners. Both groups had higher scores at the shorter reverberation time than at the longer reverberation time. Hearing-impaired subjects performed significantly…

Eleven tests of reading comprehension, language skills, and cognitive processes were administered to 20 high school readers with learning disabilities and 20 controls. The variance on nonverbal tests was greater for the group with LD than for the controls; some individuals with learning disabilities performed as well as the controls. (Author/DB)

The ability of 54 learning-disabled high-school students to monitor their comprehension was compared under three prereading conditions: self-questions only, structured overviews and self-questions, and a control condition. Subjects receiving both the overviews and self-questions were best able to detect errors during reading. (Author/DB)

The study compared the effectiveness of providing elementary students with learning disabilities with either (1) instruction in both story structure and self-questioning techniques or (2) just training in story structure identification. The combined self-questioning and story structure group demonstrated the greatest gains in reading…

This study applied Reader Response theory (which stresses an aesthetic experience with the text) with seven less proficient readers (learning-disabled fifth and sixth graders). Student response was best when the text was read to them, when their responses were oral, and when instruction focused on active meaning construction and the reader/text…

This article reports on a reading comprehension instructional technique which uses reciprocal-like teaching formats in groups and semantic mapping to make text structures apparent. The procedure significantly affected recall of expository ideas and knowledge of comprehension strategies with 28 intermediate grade students with learning…

The study assessed the ability to track connected discourse by a congenitally profoundly deaf adult using an electrocutaneous vocoder and/or a vibrotactile aid in conjunction with or without lipreading and aided hearing. Overall, improvement in tracking performance occurred within and across phases of the study. (Author/DB)

This study investigated the effects of advance organizers on the English reading comprehension of six bilingual fifth and sixth grade learning disabled students whose primary language was Spanish. An alternating treatment design was implemented. Following each treatment, the students read an expository text written in English and answered eight…