Williams syndrome is a genetic disorder that, it has been claimed, results in an unusual pattern of linguistic strengths and weaknesses. The current study investigated the hypothesis that there is a reduced influence of lexical knowledge on phonological short-term memory in Williams syndrome. Fourteen children with Williams syndrome and 2…

A study examined the nature and extent of the instruction, application, and practice in deriving word meanings from context in a variety of basal reading series. Seven major basal reading series at the fourth-grade level (published between 1986 and 1989 and readily available) were analyzed. Results indicated that: (1) the series differed…

A study examined the effectiveness of teaching students the vocabulary of mathematics. Subjects in the experimental group, 14 students in a remedial math section of a secondary school basic skills program, were taught the vocabulary and definitions of 50 mathematical terms as identified on the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, Mathematics.…

Two studies examined the relationship between word knowledge and reading comprehension. Subjects were college undergraduates with high and low verbal abilities as indicated by a standardized verbal aptitude test. The first study involved a multiple choice vocabulary test from which words that both groups defined correctly were selected. The…

Designed for teachers of high school students, the unit proposes an individualized approach for teaching vocabulary. Students choose from three vocabulary word lists which represent levels of difficulty and which are chosen from words selected by students during the previous semester. In vocabulary notebooks, students enter pronunciation…

A study was conducted to identify family characteristics and media use patterns associated with subscription to various types of cable television services. Parent interviews, week-long television viewing diaries, and children's Peabody Picture Vocabulary test scores for 237 children, aged three or five years, were subjected to stepwise…

Designed to provide information about people's listening and reading skills, this battery of tests provides information about how well an individual or group listens or reads in comparison to the young adult population used as a norm for this assessment battery. The battery was developed for use with youth and adult populations at or above 10…

Four experiments were conducted to determine how the keyword method of vocabulary instruction affects both subjects' comprehension of words encountered in sentences (experiments 1 and 2), and their ability to use words in appropriate sentences (experiments 3 and 4). In the first two experiments, college students were presented sentences containing…

To determine why ninth grade students taking the "Minimum Basic Skills Test" (MBST) and the "California Achievement Test" (CAT) performed differently in relation to reading achievement, a study investigated whether the noted discrepencies in reading achievement on the tests were due to differences in vocabulary and…

This placement test is intended to help teachers conduct oral and literacy assessment when placing adults into English as a second language (ESL) programs. The 15-item oral assessment, which consists of three 5-item series, includes questions relating to students' backgrounds and goals that are designed to determine whether the students' English…

This paper reports the results of a behavioral anchoring analysis of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (Form G, Level 12) vocabulary (41 items) and reading comprehension (56 items) tests. Subjects were 82 sixth-grade students enrolled at the Carterville (Illinois) Grade School. More specifically, a curriculum-referenced interpretation of the ability…

Following a literature review on speech and language development of twins, case studies are presented of six sets of identical twins screened for entrance into kindergarten. Five sets of the twins and one boy from the sixth set failed to pass the screening test, particularly the speech and language section, and were referred for therapy to correct…

"Man and the Gulf of Mexico" (MGM) is a marine science curriculum series developed to meet the needs of 10th through 12th grade students in Mississippi and Alabama schools. This MGM unit on the diversity of marine plants is divided into 12 sections. The first section introduces the unit by providing objectives and activities on why…

Using the counting features in previous mean length of utterance (MLU) studies, a study of the active vocabularies of adolescents looked at seven concrete features of the words 104 seventh grade and 100 eleventh grade subjects gave in response to 10 pictures. Each subject wrote five words for each of the pictures, which were analyzed for number of…

A project dealing with the development of computer-assisted instructional materials to teach new vocabulary words to college students is discussed in this paper. Seven different instructional modules for teaching new words are being developed at the University of Pittsburgh; they are entitled: define, word relations, classify, words in context,…