The Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) was developed to assess aspects of communicative impairment that are not adequately evaluated by contemporary standardised language tests. These are predominantly pragmatic abnormalities seen in social communication, although other qualitative aspects of speech and language were also included. Some items covering social relationships and restricted interests were incorporated, so that the relationship between pragmatic difficulties and other characteristics of pervasive developmental disorders could be explored. Checklist ratings were obtained for 76 children aged 7 to 9 years, all of whom had received special education for language impairment. In 71 cases, 2 raters (usually a teacher and speech-language therapist) independently completed the checklist, making it possible to establish inter-rater reliability. From an initial pool of 93 items, 70 items, grouped into 9 scales, were retained. Five of the subscales were concerned with pragmatic aspects of communication. A composite pragmatic impairment scale formed from these subscales had inter-rater reliability and internal consistency of around .80. This composite discriminated between children with a school diagnosis of semantic-pragmatic disorder and those with other types of specific language impairment (SLI). The majority of children with pragmatic language impairments did not have any evidence of restricted interests or significant difficulties in the domains of social relationships.

Development of the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC): a method for assessing qualitative aspects of communicative impairment in children.

A descriptive taxonomy, the pragmatic protocol, was developed for this study. The protocol consists of 30 pragmatic parameters of language. The purpose of the study was to test the utility of the t...

A clinical appraisal of the pragmatic aspects of language

Will reading habit influence your life? Many say yes. Reading social class and mental illness a community study is a good habit; you can develop this habit to be such interesting way. Yeah, reading habit will not only make you have any favourite activity. It will be one of guidance of your life. When reading has become a habit, you will not make it as disturbing activities or as boring activity. You can gain many benefits and importances of reading.

Social class and mental illness: a community study

Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open to questions of method and interpretation. This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological-age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers. Children produced both spoken and written summaries of two educational videotapes that provided models of either narrative or expository (informational) discourse. Productivity measures, including total T-units, total words, and words per minute, were significantly lower for children with LLD than for CA children. Fluency (percent T-units with mazes) and lexical diversity (number of different words) measures were similar for all children. Grammatical complexity as measured by words per T-uni...

General language performance measures in spoken and written narrative and expository discourse of school-age children with language learning disabilities.

To clarify the relationship between oral language and early reading development, the authors administered to 39 children a broad range of oral language measures in 3 areas (metalinguistics, structural language, and narrative discourse); measures of background variables (IQ, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, family literacy); and measures of reading ability (word recognition, pseudoword reading, passage comprehension) in kindergarten and in 1st and 2nd grades. The authors used regression analyses to identify parsimonious models that explained variance in early reading. The main finding of the study was that semantic abilities (i.e., oral definitions and word retrieval), not phonological awareness, predicted 2nd-grade reading comprehension. As expected, phonological awareness skill in kindergarten predicted single-word reading at 1st and 2nd grades. The finding that semantic skills predicted passage comprehension suggests that the importance of different oral language skills to early reading...

A Longitudinal Analysis of the Connection Between Oral Language and Early Reading

Spontaneously generated oral stories were obtained from 93 learning-disabled (LD) and normally achieving (NA) students, 14 to 16 each at 8:0-9:11, 10:0-11:11, and 12:0-13:11 age levels. The stories were analyzed using an adapted version of Stein and Glenn's (1979) story grammar. The results showed significant group and age differences. The stories told by the LD subjects contained fewer propositions and complete episodes and contained significantly fewer Minor Setting statements than those of their NA peers. Within an episode, the LD subjects were less likely to include Response, Attempt, and Plan statements than the NA counterparts. Group differences were also found in the area of interepisode relations. The major age-related findings were an increased occurrence of complete episodes and a greater frequency of embedded episodes as a function of increasing age. Findings are discussed with regard to the development of oral narration abilities. Explanations are offered to account for the storytelling deficits exhibited by the LD subjects.

Narrative discourse: spontaneously generated stories of learning-disabled and normally achieving students.

This paper describes an organizational framework for the assessment of pragmatic abilities in children. The framework addresses the areas of communicative intention, presupposition, and the social organization of discourse. For each area, assessment parameters are presented in coordination with a review of pertinent literature.

Assessing the pragmatic abilities of children: Part 1. Organizational framework and assessment parameters

This study examined the dyadic verbal communication skills of learning disabled and normally achieving 4th- and 5th-grade boys. The performances of 12 learning disabled children paired with 12 normally achieving children were compared with those of 12 dyads composed only of normally achieving children. The children exchanged information regarding a pattern of blocks under conditions varying the channels available for communication and feedback. All children performed the tasks in both Speaker and Listener roles. A measure of dyadic success was determined. In addition, the language used by the children was examined to obtain information on such variables as information content, response to questions, questions asked, and amount and efficiency of interactions. Dyads involving learning disabled children were found to be less successful and less efficient than those consisting of only normally achieving children. Further, the learning disabled children performed less successfully in certain aspects of the Spe...

Dyadic Verbal Communication Abilities of Learning Disabled and Normally Achieving Fourth- and Fifth-Grade Boys:

General guidelines are presented for the assessment of children's pragmatic behaviors. Specific evaluation procedures and activities are described for each component of the organizational framework detailed in Part 1.

Assessing the Pragmatic Abilities of Children

Thirty preschool children, 10 each at the 3-,4-, and 5-year-old levels, participated in two structured tasks designed to assess both comprehension and production of a full range of directive forms. In contrast to previous reports, the results indicated no significant differences in directive comprehension or production as a function of age; children in all age groups demonstrated the ability to understand and verbally encode the intent of most types of directive forms. However, the two most implicit forms, Question Directives and Hints, were complied with significantly less frequently than the more explicit forms, and were uused less often in the production task. The present findings indicate the importance of analyzing directive forms along a continuum of explicitness rather than dichotomizing them as direct versus indirect. Finally, the results are interpreted as providing indirect support for the general notion that mastery of some implicit forms may be achieved later than the acquisition of more explicit forms.

Nancy J. Spekman

Papers

Narrative discourse: spontaneously generated stories of learning-disabled and normally achieving students.

Assessing the pragmatic abilities of children: Part 1. Organizational framework and assessment parameters

Dyadic Verbal Communication Abilities of Learning Disabled and Normally Achieving Fourth- and Fifth-Grade Boys:

Assessing the Pragmatic Abilities of Children

Preschool Children's Comprehension and Production of Directive Forms