Verbal communication relies heavily on the ability to effortlessly produce intended words to express a meaning. This capacity is frequently impaired in individuals with aphasia, and impairment often lasts well into the chronic stages. However, the nature of anomia can vary. Phonological neighborhood density (PND) is one feature of words which has been shown to impact the ease of retrieval in speakers with aphasia; words with more similar-sounding neighbors are easier to retrieve because the neighbors help activate the target. However, it is unclear how different types of lexical access breakdowns affect the impact of PND. The aim of this project was to analyze the relationship between word retrieval accuracy, speech error patterns, and PND in individuals with aphasia. Twenty-two participants with various types and severities of aphasia named 200 single-syllable line drawings. WebFit, an online software program designed to fit naming data to a theoretical model of word retrieval, was used to characterize participants' error patterns by calculating the strength of connections within the lexicon, as well as the rate of decay. Analyses confirmed previous findings that participants with all types of breakdown achieved lower rates of overall accuracy. Weaker connections between semantic knowledge and words resulted in a more errors that were close to the target, relative to errors with no relationship to the target. Individuals with more severe impairments of the semantic-lexical connections and the lexical-phonological connections produced words with many neighbors more accurately than words with fewer neighbors. Implications for initial therapy target selection and directions for further research are discussed.

Limited research is available about how lexical and phonological verb properties interact with past tense production by children. Frequency of the inflected form and phonotactic probability might serve as input-driven alternatives to previously-studied factors such as lexical aspect and coda composition. Archival elicited production data from 4-9 year old children with typical language (N = 24) and specific language impairment (N=14) using 108 two-clause complex sentences/85 different verbs were analyzed for past tense use, coda composition, telicity, phonotactic probability (Vitevitch & Luce, 2004), and lexical frequency (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000). Several regression models were considered, including one with only categorical factors (e.g. obstruent/continuant ending), one with only continuous factors (e.g. average biphone probability), one with only phonological factors, one with only lexical factors, and several mixed models. Diagnostic status and verb regularity accounted for the majority of the variance. The combination of lexical frequency of the inflected form with residuals of stem lexical frequency was the best lexical model. Place and manner information for the final consonant of the stem comprised the best phonological model. These two models combined into a final overall predictive model.

<p> </p><p>Den socialt kompetente har hög social status, många vänner, ett funktionellt beteende och sociala förmågor så som empati och hjälpsamhet. Avsaknad av social kompetens innebär bland annat känslomässiga och beteendemässiga problem. I denna studie medverkade totalt 30 gymnasieelever som genomgick två arbetsminnestest samt fyllde i en självvärderingsenkät som mäter social kompetens. Syftet var att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan en tonårings arbetsminne och sociala kompetens. Studien begränsades till att mäta arbetsminnets fonologiska och visuellspatiala lagringsenheter samt två sociala förmågor; prosocialt beteende och initiativtagande. Inga signifikanta korrelationer mellan arbetsminne och social kompetens kunde påvisas. Eventuellt kan de icke existerande korrelationerna bero på att fel del av arbetsminnet eller fel del av den social kompetens stod i fokus för studien.</p>

This study examined the unique contributions of morphological awareness and phonological recoding to word decoding, reading comprehension, and reading vocabulary for 197 Spanish-speaking English language learners enrolled in the fifth grade. The study also explored the contribution of phonological recoding, measured by accuracy on a pseudo-word decoding task, to the prediction of the same components of reading achievement. Specifically the study explored whether the contribution of phonological recoding changed when morphological awareness and oral vocabulary (a mediator of reading achievement) were added as predictors. To examine unique contributions, morphological awareness was separated from phonological and orthographic confounds present in opaque morphological relationships by using structural equation modeling to construct a latent variable stemming from the shared variance of four morphological tasks with different levels of morphological transparency, and therefore different phonological and orthographic processing demands. A latent variable of phonological recoding was also created. Findings indicated that when controlling for phonological recoding, morphological awareness made a significant and meaningful contribution to passage comprehension and reading vocabulary, but not word decoding with oral vocabulary acting as a significant mediator of this relationship. The study also found that phonological recoding was a significant predictor of each reading outcome when morphological awareness was not included as a predictor, but only significantly predicted word reading when controlling for morphological awareness. Significance of these findings to research and the need for additional morphological instruction within educational settings are discussed.

Den socialt kompetente har hög social status, många vänner, ett funktionellt beteende och sociala förmågor så som empati och hjälpsamhet. Avsaknad av social kompetens innebär bland annat känslomässiga och beteendemässiga problem. I denna studie medverkade totalt 30 gymnasieelever som genomgick två arbetsminnestest samt fyllde i en självvärderingsenkät som mäter social kompetens. Syftet var att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan en tonårings arbetsminne och sociala kompetens. Studien begränsades till att mäta arbetsminnets fonologiska och visuellspatiala lagringsenheter samt två sociala förmågor; prosocialt beteende och initiativtagande. Inga signifikanta korrelationer mellan arbetsminne och social kompetens kunde påvisas. Eventuellt kan de icke existerande korrelationerna bero på att fel del av arbetsminnet eller fel del av den social kompetens stod i fokus för studien.

The purpose of the present study was to examine working memory (WM) capacity, lexical access and phonological skills in 19 children with cochlear implants (CI) (5;7-13;4 years of age) attending grades 0-2, 4, 5 and 6 and to compare their performance with 56 children with normal hearing. Their performance was also studied in relation to demographic factors. The findings indicate that children with CI had visuospatial WM capacities equivalent to the comparison group. They had lower performance levels on most of the other cognitive tests. Significant differences between the groups were not found in all grades and a number of children with CI performed within 1 SD of the mean of their respective grade-matched comparison group on most of the cognitive measures. The differences between the groups were particularly prominent in tasks of phonological WM. The results are discussed with respect to the effects of cochlear implants on cognitive development.

This paper critically reviewed the literature on the relationships between Pinyin and Chinese bilingual and monolingual children’s phonological awareness (PA) and identified areas of research worth of further investigation. As the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet providing pronunciation of the universal Chinese characters, Pinyin facilitates children’s early reading development. What research has found in English is that PA is a reliable indicator of later reading success and meta-linguistic training improves PA. In Chinese, a non-alphabetic language, there is also evidence that PA predicts reading in Chinese, which confirms the universality of PA’s role. However, research shows the uniqueness of each language: tonal awareness is stronger indicator in Chinese while phonemic awareness is stronger indicator in English. Moreover, Pinyin, the meta-linguistic training, has been found to improve PA in Chinese and reading in Chinese and possibly facilitate the cross-language transfer of PA from Chinese to English and vice versa.

This paper critically reviewed the literature on the relationships between Pinyin and Chinese bilingual and monolingual children’s phonological awareness (PA) and identified areas of research worth of further investigation. As the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet providing pronunciation of the universal Chinese characters, Pinyin facilitates children’s early reading development. What research has found in English is that PA is a reliable indicator of later reading success and meta-linguistic training improves PA. In Chinese, a non-alphabetic language, there is also evidence that PA predicts reading in Chinese, which confirms the universality of PA’s role. However, research shows the uniqueness of each language: tonal awareness is stronger indicator in Chinese while phonemic awareness is stronger indicator in English. Moreover, Pinyin, the meta-linguistic training, has been found to improve PA in Chinese and reading in Chinese and possibly facilitate the cross-language transfer of PA from Chinese to English and vice versa.

DOES A CONTINUOUS MEASURE OF HANDEDNESS PREDICT READING RELATED PROCESSES AND READING SKILLS ACROSS THE LIFESPAN? by Michele Harrison Brenneman The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between handedness, reading skills, and reading related cognitive processes. The research results with regard to handedness, specific reading skills, and reading related cognitive processes are ambiguous at best. The method in which handedness is measured contributes to these diverse research findings, therefore the present investigation addressed these methodological limitations. A large normative sample of up to 1383 participants that ranged in age from 4 to 80 completed the Woodcock Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised (Woodcock & Johnson, 1989a; Woodcock & Johnson, 1989b) or the Woodcock Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Third Edition (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) in combination with the Dean Woodcock Sensory Motor Battery (Dean & Woodcock, 2003) lateral preference scale, a continuous measure of handedness. Polynomial multiple regression analyses indicated curvilinear relationships between handedness and reading comprehension and basic reading skills, along with handedness and auditory working memory. Individuals towards the extremes of the handedness continuum performed lower on the reading related tasks. Therefore, just knowing a general classification of right, left or mixed handed will not provide significant knowledge regarding lateralization or potential cognitive and academic costs and benefits. One overarching implication of these findings is that laterality is an important predictor variable of reading skills and related reading processes, hence knowledge of an individual’s hand preference on a continuum may well be useful for evaluative purposes.

WORD READING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF AND HARD-OF-HEARING PRESCHOOLERS by Victoria Burke Siegler’s (1996) overlapping waves model of strategy development applied to reading posits that children use multiple strategies to read words from the earliest stage of reading development, that these strategies coexist over a long period of time, and that experience results in gradual change in the strategies children use and the effectiveness with which they are executed. Phonological recoding is one of the most effective early developing reading strategies and is predictive of future reading success for hearing children (Ehri, 2005; Juel & Mindencupp, 2000; Share & Gur, 1999). However, less is known regarding the extent to which young children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) develop and use phonological strategies to read words. Due to technological advances such as cochlear implants and digital hearing aids, many DHH children have sufficient functional hearing to be able to perceive and represent spoken language. For these children, beginning reading strategies may resemble those of hearing children (Geers, Tobey, Moog, & Brenner, 2008; Lederberg, Schick, & Spencer, in press). The purpose of this study was to describe changes in the word reading strategies of 15 DHH preschoolers with functional hearing. These children received explicit instruction in alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and early reading strategies in a year-long intervention. Instruction was videotaped and children’s overt behavior while independently reading words was coded for reading strategy and accuracy. The preschoolers used multiple reading strategies at all times including two phonological recoding strategies (segmenting phonemes only, segmenting and blending phonemes) and retrieval. Gradual change was observed in strategy choice, execution, and accuracy. Children’s use of segmenting only decreased while segmenting and blending phonemes increased between the beginning and middle of the year. Retrieval use increased between the middle and end of the year. Execution of phonological strategies gradually improved over the year. These results suggest young DHH children who have functional hearing develop and use strategies in a manner similar to hearing children and benefit from explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle.