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D Shankweiler

Publications and source records attributed to D Shankweiler.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1988

Sensitivity to inflectional morphology in agrammatism: investigation of a highly inflected language.

We present the results of a study with six Serbo-Croatian-speaking agrammatic patients on a test of inflectional morphology in which subjects judged whether spoken sentences were grammatical or ungrammatical. Sensitivity to two kinds of syntactic features was investigated in these aphasic patients: (1) subcategorization rules for transitive verbs (which must be followed by a noun in the accusative case; intransitive verbs can be followed by nouns in other noun cases); (2) sensitivity to the inflectional morphology marking noun case. The test items consisted of three-word sentences (noun-verb-noun) in which verb transitivity and appropriateness of the case inflection of the following noun were manipulated. Results of the grammaticality judgment task show that both syntactic properties are preserved in these patients.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Spoken sentence comprehension by good and poor readers: a study with the Token Test.

Good and poor readers in the third grade (age nine years) were examined on a test of immediate memory for word strings and on a version of the Token Test (De Renzi and Faglioni, 1978) to assess sentence comprehension. The poor readers made more errors than the good readers in recall of word strings and on some Token Test items. Those Token Test items that impose the greatest burden on short-term memory were the most sensitive to reader group differences; syntactic complexity alone did not distinguish the groups. The findings support other indications that poor readers make less effective use of working memory in processing spoken sentences than good readers; they do not indicate a syntactic deficit on the part of the poor readers.

Aptitude↗
PubMed1985

Repetitive naming and the detection of word retrieval deficits in the beginning reader.

The claim has been advanced that children with severe reading disability are generally deficient in word retrieval compared with normal readers. Support for the claim is based largely on studies of rapid naming of repetitively presented pictured objects or other nameable stimuli, a task which is apparently more sensitive to retrieval problems than the confrontation naming of items presented singly. The purpose of this study was to examine whether there is a general relationship between word retrieval speed and reading ability in beginning readers. Although such a relationship has not been detected with confrontation naming, repetitive naming may provide a more sensitive test. Accordingly, second-grade children were required to name as rapidly as possible repeated presentations of five pictured items drawn from a single category. Separate naming tests were made for objects, colors, animals, letters, and words. The results showed that there was no relationship between reading ability and naming times when the test items were selected from sets of objects, colors, or animals, whereas on letters and words, a significant relationship was found. The less-skilled readers were not, therefore, consistently slower in all repetitive naming situations. Instead their word retrieval deficits extended only to the orthographic materials.

Child↗
PubMed1978

Reading reversals and developmental dyslexia: a further study.

The pattern of errors in reading isolated words was studied in two groups of children with respect, particularly, to reversals of letter sequence and letter orientation. One group (the Institute group) consisted of children 8 to 10 years old who had been diagnosed "dyslexic" according to medical and psychoeducational criteria. The other (the School group) included all the children in a second-year elementary school class (see Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris and Berti, 1971) who fell into the lowest third on a standard test of reading achievement. Although the Institute children were somewhat poorer in word recognition than the backward readers selected purely on psychometric grounds, the groups did not differ significantly in the incidence of reversal errors. Also, for both groups, reversals represented a small proportion of the total number of reading errors. The performance of the two groups differed in two respects: in relation to directional bias in letter reversals and in the presence or absence of a significant correlation between letter-reversing and word-reversing tendencies. It was concluded from this that directional problems do not loom large in importance in most cases of reading backwardness, but may provide an additional source of difficulty for some dyslexic children. Other aspects of the error pattern were remarkably the same for both groups. The bulk of reading errors made by both groups reflect their common difficulties in phonemic segmentation of words in the lexicon, in phonetic recoding, and in mastery of the orthography--difficulties, in short, with linguistic characteristics of words rather than with their properties as visual patterns.

Achievement↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Comprehension of temporal terms by good and poor readers.

Poor beginning readers often have difficulty comprehending spoken sentences with complex syntactic structures. This study attempts to identify the reasons for this difficulty. Second-grade good and poor readers were tested for comprehension of spoken sentences containing the temporal terms before and after. Processing load was varied systematically while holding syntax constant in an effort to determine whether processing factors contribute to poor readers' comprehension problems, or whether poor readers are simply lacking the structural knowledge required to understand sentences containing temporal terms. The poor readers' high level of performance under conditions of reduced processing demands suggests that their misinterpretations in spoken language understanding may be due, in large part, to limitations in verbal working memory.

Attention↗