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Item does not contain fulltext We evaluated the role of digitized speech output on the maintenance of requesting and frequency of vocalizations in three children with developmental disabilities. The children were taught to request access to preferred objects using an augmentative communication speech-generating device (SGD). Following acquisition, rates of requesting and vocalizations were compared across two conditions (speech output on versus speech output off) that were alternated on a session-by-session basis. There were no major or consistent differences across the two conditions for the three children, suggesting that access to preferred objects was the critical variable maintaining use of the SGDs. The results also suggest that feedback in the form of digitized speech from the SGD did not inhibit vocalizations. One child began to speak single words during the latter part of the study, suggesting that in some cases AAC intervention involving SGDs may facilitate speech.

Contains fulltext : 64623.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) This study of the reading of text found that despite their lower reading speed on a reading-comprehension task, the children with low vision comprehended texts at least as well as did the sighted children. Children with low vision need more time to read and comprehend a text, but they seem to use this time with enough efficiency to process the semantic, as well as the syntactic, information.

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Contains fulltext : 64017.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The authors compared evaluations by parents and teachers of the communicative abilities of deaf children. Such comparisons between parents' and professionals' assessments of the language development of children who are deaf can provide useful information on which to base ecologically valid intervention approaches. A secondary interest of the authors was to investigate the possible influences on language development of gender, the presence or absence of cochlear implantation, and communication modality (i.e., auditory-verbal or bilingual). The study included the mothers and teachers of 14 deaf children educated in auditory-verbal or bilingual programs. Two scales from a survey instrument, Profiles of the Hearing Impaired (Webster & Webster, 1995), were used. No significant differences between the teachers' and parents' evaluations were found. Gender, cochlear implantation, and communication modality were found to have no significant effect on the evaluations.

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Contains fulltext : 63073.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The validity of phoneme recognition as an indicator of phonemic awareness at kindergarten age is investigated. Six paper and pencil phonemic awareness (PA) tests, phoneme recognition among them, are administered groupwise to Dutch children a few months before the beginning of formal literacy education. Additional phonological tests and an early reading test are administered individually. Ten months later, children are tested again with PA and literacy tests. Structural equation modeling shows the relations among tests to correspond broadly with findings reported in the literature. The PA test scores are determined by one common factor, and the early PA factor influences later literacy through its influence on later PA skill. Phoneme segmentation has the highest loading on the PA factor, but phoneme recognition is its best paper and pencil representative. Unlike phoneme segmentation, phoneme recognition competence can develop in the absence of literacy skills. Phoneme recognition equals phoneme segmentation in sensitivity and specificity when predicting later literacy failure.

Contains fulltext : 63179.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) In French, the final [(r)] of dernier is not pronounced in dernier train (last train), but is pronounced, in the following syllable, in a liaison environment like dernier oignon (last onion). Due to liaison, dernier oignon becomes homophonous with dernier rognon (last kidney). In four pairs of cross-modal priming experiments, French participants made visual lexical decisions to vowel- or consonant-initial targets (e.g., oignon, rognon) following both versions of spoken sentences like C'est le dernier oignon/rognon. Facilitation was found for both types of target when targets matched the speaker's intended segmentation, but was weaker when they mismatched the intended segmentation. In unambiguous sentences there was facilitation only for targets matching the speaker's intentions. The consonants in the liaison environments were shorter than the word-initial consonants (e.g., [(r)] in dernier oignon vs. rognon). Word recognition therefore appears to be influenced by subphonemic cues to the words that speakers intend.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the development of and interrelations between the language proficiencies and reading abilities of children learning to read in either a first language or a second language. The authors compared the reading-comprehension, word-decoding, and oral-language skills of both high and low SES Dutch third and fourth graders to the skills of low SES minority third and fourth graders from a Turkish or Moroccan background living in the Netherlands. Several tests of reading comprehension, word decoding, oral text comprehension, morphosyntactic knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge were administered at the beginning of third grade, the end of third grade, and the end of fourth grade. The results showed the minority children to be faster decoders than the Dutch low SES children. With respect to reading comprehension and oral language proficiency, however, the minority children were found to lag behind the Dutch children in all respects. With respect to the interrelations between oral-language skills and reading skills, the development of reading comprehension was found to be influenced more by top-down comprehension-based processes than by bottom-up word-decoding processes for both the first- and second-language learners. The oral Dutch skills of the minority children played a more prominent role in the explanation of their reading-comprehension skills than the oral-language skills of the Dutch children, however.

This article investigates the multimodal discourses taking place in a primary school computer supported collaborative literacy environment, in which face-to-face talk in pairs is combined with computer-mediated communication. Following a socially mediated model of education, we have taken into account the collaborative process of the participants over time, the privileging processes, in relation to the discourse, afforded by the tasks and tools, and the classroom culture. We describe the contextualized nature of the interaction of children in a CSCL learning environment, by focusing on the intertextual connections that were made between different discourses. This paper highlights, in particular, the intertextual connections between written texts, face-to-face discourse and classroom culture.

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Item does not contain fulltext The aim of the present study was to investigate whether children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) show a deficit in planning syllables in speech production. Six children with DAS and six normally speaking (NS) children produced high- and low-frequency of occurrence syllable utterances, in which the syllable structure was systematically manipulated in an otherwise unchanging phoneme sequence. Anticipatory coarticulation, using second formant trajectories, and durational structure were analysed. The results showed stronger coarticulation in the children with DAS when compared to the normally speaking children. but in contrast to our expectations, in neither group was a systematic effect of syllable structure on the second format trajectory found. Effects of syllable structure did emerge for durational structure in that durational adjustments were found in the segments of the second syllable. These adjustments were less systematic in children with DAS when compared to normally speaking children. Furthermore, at the prosodic level, normally speaking children showed metrical contrasts that were not realized by the children with DAS. The latter results are interpreted as evidence for a problem in the planning of syllables in speech production of children with DAS, in particular concerning prosodic aspects, which is discussed in relation to the automation of speech production.

Steeds meer aanstaande leraren worden zowel op de lerarenopleiding als op de basisschool opgeleid. Beiden maken deel uit van de werkplekleeromgeving van aanstaande leraren. De vraag is nu: wanneer is een dergelijke werkplekleeromgeving krachtig? In dit artikel worden achttien kenmerken uit de literatuur genoemd die een indicatie zijn voor een krachtige werkplekleeromgeving. De auteurs van dit artikel hebben vervolgens onderzocht wat voor opvattingen er in de praktijk leven over de kenmerken van een krachtige werkplekleeromgeving. De theoretische en praktische inzichten blijken nauw op elkaar aan te sluiten. Vooral de rol en de vaardigheden van de mentor worden in beide bronnen als een belangrijke voorwaarde voor het succesvol leren onderwijzen in een werkplekleeromgeving gezien. Verder worden de achttien kenmerken uit de literatuur nog aangevuld met twee kenmerken die uit de opvattingen uit de praktijk naar voren komen. De lijst met kenmerken in dit artikel kan gebruikt worden bij het ontwerpen van een krachtige werkplekleeromgeving voor aanstaande leraren. Wel merken de auteurs op dat er nog geen empirische evidentie is voor positieve resultaten van het opleiden van leraren in een werkplekleeromgeving. Vervolgonderzoek wordt aangeraden.

Zusammenfassung. Bei Kindern mit physischen Beeinträchtigungen und geistigen Behinderungen ist häufig eine Nahrungsverweigerung zu beobachten. Während der Ausgangspunkt dieses Problemverhaltens oft organisch bedingt ist, wird es vielfach durch Verhaltens- und Umweltfaktoren konditioniert und aufrechterhalten. In diesen Fällen spielen Lernprozesse für die Verweigerung bzw. Vermeidung der Nahrungsaufnahme eine zentrale Rolle. In der vorliegenden Studie erwies sich eine Kombination von verhaltenstherapeutischen Verfahren bei der Behandlung eines mehrfach behinderten Kindes im Alter von 2,6 Jahren zum Aufbau eines “normalen“ Essverhaltens als effektiv.

Item does not contain fulltext The studies reported in this volume of WL&L (5: 1–2, 2002) all derive from a joint project entitled “Developing literacy in different contexts and in different languages”, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Chicago. The study encompasses seven languages — Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, Spanish, and Swedish — for which data were collected in Europe, Israel, and the US by graduate research assistants in education, linguistics, and psychology, under the supervision of a project director in each country — each of whom is listed as a first or “lead” author in the articles which follow the introduction to this collection.

Item does not contain fulltext The present study evaluates the effects of a multifaceted training procedure on the inappropriate and appropriate social behaviour of young people with mild intellectual disability and on staff responses. The training package included youth training with video feedback and self-management procedures and staff training with video and graphic feedback. The data were collected using a reversal baseline design. The results showed an increase in the occurrence of appropriate behaviour on the part of young people with mild intellectual disability. Inconsistent changes were found for inappropriate social behaviour. The provision of video and graphic feedback successfully modified the performance of direct-care staff members. Recommendations are made for further research on factors related to behaviour change in staff and young people with intellectual disability.

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Item does not contain fulltext The communication profiles of individuals with Down's syndrome (DS), Angelman syndrome (AS) and pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) were investigated and contrasted. Seventy-seven individuals participated in the study. A within-group analysis revealed that those with DS performed better on tacting or labelling and echoing than on manding or requesting. No other effects were found, apart from an absence of echoing in those with AS, a result that is hardly surprising. A between-groups analysis revealed no differences between the aetiological groups in terms of their use of mands or requests and tacts. Individuals with DS and PDD did not differ in their scores on echoic functioning. The implications of these findings for the study of behavioural phenotypes and for communication intervention are discussed.

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Item does not contain fulltext The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations between communicative competence and five dimensions of personality in 241 first and second language–learning children in The Netherlands. To determine the underlying communicative competence of the first and second language learners of Dutch, a broad array of linguistic measures and teacher judgments were collected. Observational scales referring to the Big Five personality factors were used to characterize the children’s personalities. The results showed that three basic components underlie both the monolingual and bilingual children’s communicative competence: organizational competence, involving lexical, syntactic, discourse, and functional abilities; pragmatic competence, involving sociocultural routines and illocutionary force; and strategic competence, involving the planning and monitoring of communicative behavior. The relations between the different dimensions of personality and the components of communicative competence revealed the following patterns to characterize first language learners: conscientiousness and emotional stability correlated with basic organizational skills; openness to experience correlated with pragmatic competence; and a broad range of personality characteristics with the acquisition of communicative strategies. In contrast, primarily openness to experience and, to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and extraversion were found to be related to the buildup of basic organizational skills, the acquisition of pragmatic skills, and the development of monitoring strategies in second language learners.

Item does not contain fulltext Four experiments examined the facilitation which occurs when target spoken words rhyme with preceding spoken primes. In Experiment 1, listeners' lexical decisions were faster to words following rhyming words (e.g., ramp-LAMP) than to words following unrelated primes (e.g., pink-LAMP). No facilitation was observed for nonword targets. Targets which almost rhymed with their primes (foils, e.g., bulk-SULSH) were included in Experiment2; facilitation for rhyming targets was severely attenuated. Experiments 3 and 4 were single-word shadowing variants of the earlier experiments. There was facilitation for rhyming words and nonwords, and no significant influence of the presence of foils on the priming effect. A major component of the facilitation in lexical decision appears to be strategic: Listeners are biased to say "yes" to targets which rhyme with their primes, unless foils discourage this strategy. The non-strategic component of phonological facilitation may reflect speech perception processes which operate prior to lexical access.

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Item does not contain fulltext This paper examines how choice of subject NP types and structures changes in the development of text construction, and the extent of variation in the developmental patterns which are produced in speech and in writing. The population for this study consisted of 80 participants — 40 grade-school children and 40 university-level adults — with 20 participants in each of four languages: Dutch, Hebrew, English, and Spanish. The database for each language-specific analysis consisted of 40 grade-school texts and 40 adult texts. In each group, half were spoken texts and half written, half were narratives and half expository texts: altogether 320 texts. All subject NP slots in each text were counted and classified by category of realization (zero, pronoun, or lexical), by pronoun type (personal vs. impersonal), and by lexical complexity (terminal NPs governing a single lexical noun vs. non-terminal NPs governing more than one lexical noun). In general, the written expositions of adults are the preferred site for lexical subjects and for non-terminal subjects. Among both children and adults, narratives contain more personal subject pronouns, and expository texts contain more impersonal pronouns. Several cross-linguistic differences emerged (mainly between Spanish and the other three languages), reflecting differences in the syntactic, inflectional, and pronominal patternings of the target languages.

Item does not contain fulltext The Sonksen Picture Guide to Visual Function (SPGVF) assesses a person's ability to discriminate pictures of everyday objects. Sonksen added the SPGVF to tests of visual acuity, because real objects, miniatures, and pictures are the main learning medium for young children. In earlier studies correlations have been found between visual acuity and responses to the SPGVF. However, to date no studies have used visually impaired children. In the study reported here, the associations between performance on the SPGVF task, visual acuity and contrast sensitivity were investigated. Participants were 17 visually impaired and 29 children without disabilities, 4-6 years of age. The results showed that visual acuity was more important for picture recognition than contrast sensitivity. Contrast thresholds < 3.33% implied that not all SPGVF-pictures could be recognized. The visually impaired children in the current study showed shorter mean identification distances than the normally sighted children in the original Sonksen and Macrae study.

Item does not contain fulltext This paper forms a bridge between the article on noun phrase patterning by Ravid et al. 2002 and that on passive voice constructions by Jisa et al. 2002. The study reports on a cross-linguistic, developmental study of verbal structures and verb types used in two genres of written discourse: personal narratives and expository texts. The study is aimed at (a) establishing the profile of linguistic features that characterize and differentiate these two genres; (b) identifying the developmental changes beyond middle childhood that lead to the proficient use of a full repertoire of verbal structures in the construction of both types of text; and (c) providing fresh empirical evidence for cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the linguistic devices used for Genre differentiation. The paper begins to address these issues by considering quantitative aspects of Genre differentiation in four age-groups (grade-school children, junior high school, high school, and adults) and in five languages (Dutch, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, and Spanish). We expected narratives and expository texts to be characterized by contrasting distribution of the categories that we analysed — verb tense, aspect, mood, voice, and person — across the age-groups and languages under study. To test this prediction, all verbs in our sample were analysed using common coding procedures in all five languages, followed by a statistical analysis of the frequency distribution of each coded category (as our dependent variables) across Age and Genre in each of the languages.

Item does not contain fulltext In dit artikel wordt allereerst ingegaan op de omvang van de leesproblemen van dove kinderen. Ook de mogelijke oorzaken komen aan bod, waarbij met name aandacht gegeven wordt aan het proces van woordherkenning bij dove lezers. Vervolgens wordt een trainingsexperiment beschreven, waarin getracht is de vaardigheid in woordherkenning van dove kinderen te verbeteren door in computerondersteunde oefeningen de getrainde woorden zowel met spraak als met gebaren uit de Nederlandse Gebarentaal te verbinden. Proefpersonen waren 16 dove kinderen in de leeftijdsrange van 6 tot 10 jaar. Het gemiddelde gehoorverlies van deze kinderen was 104 dB. Proefpersonen kregen een training waarin hen werd geleerd geschreven woorden te koppelen aan plaatjes. Voor en na de training werden ze getest in woordherkenning. Resultaten lieten een significante verbetering in woordherkenning zien na de training. Woorden die geleerd waren via spraak en gebaren werden vaker correct herkend dan woorden die alleen via spraak aangeleerd waren. Aangezien training in het herkennen van geschreven woorden de accuraatheid van woordherkenning verhoogt, is het van belang dat hieraan in het leesonderwijs aan doven aandacht besteed wordt. Hierbij leidt het gebruik van gebaren als toevoeging op de gesproken taal tot een beter resultaat. 15 p.

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Item does not contain fulltext The oral word reading and word spelling achievement of 147 visually impaired elementary school children was compared with that of their normal vision peers. On average, the literacy development of the visually impaired children appeared to be hampered by their visual defects. A disproportionate number of them performed in the lowest 10% class estimated for the general population. Being visually impaired, however, does not necessarily preclude someone from being a good reader or speller since 10-27% of the visually impaired children scored in the uppermost performance quartile. The between-groups difference for spelling was relatively small and approached zero towards the end of elementary school, suggesting that visual impairment only interferes with the acquisition of orthographic knowledge for a limited period of time. This, and the pattern in the reading data, indicate that the cause of the discrepancy is not so much in knowledge as well as in factors limiting handling speed. Using questionnaire data provided by the teachers, it was found that of the frequent negative conditions of the visual system, only the presence of visual field restrictions - central field restrictions in particular - had a significant inordinate effect on literacy performance.

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Contains fulltext : 135255.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) The primary goal of this study was to compare a paper-and-pencil version of the lexical decision task, which can be administered groupwise, with reading aloud a differently ordered list of the same words and pseudowords. Participants were first and second graders (“normal readers”) and students from schools for children with learning difficulties. On the average, the latter “poor readers” scored at the same oral reading level as the normal readers, but were older. The correlation between both tasks appeared to be high and both tasks had comparable correlations with third variables, suggesting that performance is determined by the same processes. Because the lexical decision task showed little evidence for guessing, it may be an — even better — alternative for oral reading. No differences between participant groups were found that point to different reading strategies. Error analysis, however, indicates that the poor readers probably have a specific problem in the oral reading of pseudowords.

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Item does not contain fulltext This study investigated the relationship between conditions of employment of direct-care staff in The Netherlands and the distribution of their activities in residential facilities for people with intellectual disability. Three hundred and eighty-eight direct-care staff working at 39 living groups in 10 residential facilities participated. Data were obtained by natural observations. The results suggest that (a) leaders of living groups are clearly different from other direct-care staff in terms of their distribution of activities, (b) educational and training level of staff did not differentially affect resident-oriented care, and (c) extent of contract does affect time staff spend on organisation and housekeeping. Generally, employee characteristics tended to affect nonresident-oriented activities of direct-care staff (i.e., organisation, housekeeping, and off-task) rather than resident-oriented activities, such as stimulative custodial care, recreation, and training.

Item does not contain fulltext The purpose of this study was to describe the first and second language literacy levels of a sample of 222 Turkish children living in the Netherlands and to identify the factors that are related to individual variation in their literacy performance. Measures of both school literacy and functional literacy were taken in the target languages, Turkish and Dutch. Data of monolingual control groups were used as benchmarks. To explore individual variation in biliteracy scores, background characteristics originating from the child, the family, and the school were examined. The results of the study indicated that the children in the Netherlands attained lower levels of literacy than their monolingual peers. The level of biliteracy of the children in the Netherlands turned out to be primarily related to the factors of home stimulation, parents’ motivation for schooling, and children’s self-esteem.

Item does not contain fulltext This study pertains to assessing the effects of electric shocks that are used in the treatment of severe self-injurious behavior. With pain sensation and startle response as the dependent variables and focusing versus distraction of recipient's attention to the electric shocks as the independent variable, these stimuli were administered to 60 paid volunteers. Using ANOVA, no significant effect of the independent variable was found on either measure. However, repeated administration of the electric shock produced a significant increment of pain sensation, with a concomitant significant decrease of magnitude of the startle response. No interaction effect was found.

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Item does not contain fulltext Sleep problems are common among young children with developmental disabilities. In many cases, parental attention has shaped and reinforced these problems. In the present study, extinction of parental attention was effective in the elimination and long-term maintenance of nighttime crying with a young child with a physical disability.

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