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PubMed2004

Examining multiple sources of influence on the reading comprehension skills of children who use cochlear implants.

Children with profound deafness are at risk for serious reading difficulties. Multiple factors affect their development of reading skills, including use of cochlear implants. Further, multiple factors influence the overall success that children experience with their cochlear implants. These factors include the age at which they receive an implant, method of communication, vocabulary skills, preoperative residual hearing, and socioeconomic status. Ninety-one children with prelingual and profound hearing impairments who received cochlear implants at varying ages participated in the study. Structural equation modeling confirmed that multiple factors affected young cochlear implant users' reading comprehension skills and that there were significant associations between the predictors of reading comprehension. Pre-implant vocabulary had an indirect positive effect on reading through postimplant vocabulary, which had a direct positive effect on reading. Overall, children with stronger language skills demonstrated stronger reading outcomes. Age at implantation both directly and indirectly, through postimplant vocabulary, affected reading outcomes, and the total effect was large. Children who were younger when they received their implants tended to have higher reading comprehension scores. Socioeconomic status negatively affected reading. Children who used total communication prior to implantation tended to have stronger pre-implant vocabulary scores, but the total effect of pre-implant communication method on children's reading skills was negligible. Research and educational implications are discussed.

Chi-Square Distribution↗

PubMed1982

Measurement of reading comprehension in aphasia with the RCBA.

Information is presented regarding the Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia (RCBA). The results of reliability and validity measures show the test to be psychometrically adequate. Multidimensional and plus-minus methods of scoring the test are equally effective, but plus-minus scoring appears to be more efficient. Order of subtest difficulty is consistent for the entire subject group and does not vary significantly for fluent and nonfluent aphasics. Finally, both auditory comprehension and overall severity of aphasia correlate significantly with reading comprehension.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

Validity of multiple-sentence reading comprehension tests for aphasic adults.

This study assessed the passage dependency of multiple-sentence reading test items from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1983), the Minnesota Test for Differential Diagnosis of Aphasia (Schuell, 1965), Examining for Aphasia (Eisenson, 1954), the Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia (LaPointe & Horner, 1979), and the Western Aphasia Battery (Kertesz, 1982). More than half of the test items from these reading tests were answered correctly by a significantly greater than chance number of both aphasic and non-brain-damaged adults without reading the passages whose comprehension the items purported to test. These results suggest that published tests for assessing aphasic persons' comprehension of multiple-sentence passages do not provide valid estimates of such persons' ability to comprehend information from printed texts.

Aged↗

PubMed1978

Comprehension of pronominal reference by speakers of black English.

This study was concerned with the comprehension of pronoun reference by children from north Texas who used features of black English in their oral language. Forty-eight children were included in the study, eight selected from each chromological age group from four through nine years. Tasks required that the children listen to 15 sentences, five of which included a pronound with unrestricted reference and 10 of which included a pronoun operating under the nonidentity requirement with restricted reference to a subject outside of the sentence. In response to specific questions, subjects were required to point to toy figures that represented the pronoun referents in the sentences. Results showed a significant and uniform increase in comprehension as a function of chronological age, with no subject attaining less than 90% comprehension among the seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old children.

Black or African American↗

PubMed1986

Acquisition of semantic role by language-disordered children: differences between production and comprehension.

Six 3-year-old language-disordered children were taught the relationship between semantic role and word order through either production or comprehension training. All 6 subjects successfully learned the relationship through production training as indicated by their responses to a production probe and by their use of word order to express semantic role distinctions in their conversational speech. These subjects never used word order cues to decode semantically reversible sentences on comprehension tests even after they were using word order appropriately in their conversational speech. Also, none of the subjects were able to learn word order through comprehension training. The results were interpreted to mean the subjects could learn a word-order rule by teaching them to say sentences that contrast word order and meaning but that they could not learn by being taught to respond to sentences. The problem with this latter procedure may be that it requires a mental operation that is beyond the level of cognitive development of children under the age of 4.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed1987

Verbal and perceptual analogical reasoning and proportional metaphor comprehension in young children.

In contrast to the common assumption that young children have little or no ability to reason by analogy or to comprehend proportional metaphors, the present study demonstrated that children as young as age 5 years have an emerging ability to solve both verbal and perceptual proportional analogy problems and to detect the meanings of proportional metaphoric sentences. These results were largely because the experimental tasks were designed to minimize the number of factors that would restrict the performance of young children. The results indicated that the years between 5 and 7 mark a steady improvement in analogical reasoning and proportional metaphor comprehension, but that children ages 5, 6, and 7 display a wide-ranging ability in these areas. It was also found that perceptual analogical reasoning was statistically related to verbal analogical reasoning and to proportional metaphor comprehension, and that perceptual analogical reasoning and proportional metaphor comprehension were both statistically related to receptive vocabulary development.

Child↗

PubMed1988

Proverb comprehension in context: a developmental study with children and adolescents.

Although previous studies have reported that proverb comprehension remains quite literal before adolescence, the results of the present study indicated that fourth graders performed well on a proverb comprehension task involving contextual information and a written multiple choice format. It was also found that performance on the proverb task steadily improved at least through the eighth grade and was significantly correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical reasoning task. The study contributes to the small but growing body of information concerning language development during the preadolescent and adolescent years and may have some important implications for the assessment of youngsters of this age range who have comprehension deficits that are troublesome, yet difficult to document.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

Grammaticality judgments and sentence comprehension in agrammatic aphasia.

The relationship between sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgment was examined for both neurologically intact and agrammatic aphasic subjects. Aphasic subjects were able to make grammaticality judgments and comprehension judgments, but were less accurate than healthy control subjects. However, the tasks appeared dissociated for the aphasic subjects: Both the effects of semantic cues and the hierarchy of difficulty of sentence types differed across the two tasks. Further, the findings suggest that not all aspects of morpho-syntactic processing may be equally disrupted in aphasia. The results argue against both a central deficit view of agrammatic aphasia, and a view suggesting that syntactic processing is intact whereas semantic or thematic mapping is not. Instead, the results indicate that the respective performance domains of comprehension and grammaticality judgment may draw on different processes and/or operate on different aspects of the language input.

Adult↗

PubMed1989

Effects of age on comprehension of complex sentences in adulthood.

This study was designed to determine effects of aging on comprehension of complex sentences. In particular, we were interested in whether normal aging modifies a subsystem of comprehension (i.e., syntactic or semantic) or places unusual demand on working memory related to the distance between constituents that must be integrated. Five age-defined groups of healthy adults were asked questions about thematic roles of nouns in sentences with center-embedded or right-branching subordinate clauses. Results indicated that comprehension accuracy declines after age 60. Although aging did not affect the semantic component, it did affect the syntactic component when evaluated with sentences representing implausible events. There appeared to be an effect of distance between constituents in the 70s decade that was not related solely to embedding of a subordinate clause. Instead of affecting a single component of the language system, normal aging may have an impact on interactions between components.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Children's comprehension and production of derivational suffixes.

Relational knowledge of 21 derivational suffixes conveying six different meanings was investigated with 120 children from 3rd to 8th grade, and with 40 adults. The results obtained from a nonsense-word paradigm indicated that suffixes were comprehended with greater accuracy than they were produced, particularly by the children. Children in the 5th through 8th grades were more accurate than children in the 3rd and 4th grades in both suffix comprehension and production. Children and adults demonstrated greatest accuracy in both comprehension and production with the meaning "without X" (conveyed by the suffix less). Overall, they showed low comprehension accuracy with a diminutive suffix, ette, and the suffix ful, meaning "character of X." They showed low production accuracy with "can be Xed" (able). Productive suffixes were produced more frequently than less productive suffixes to convey a given meaning.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1996

Proverb comprehension in youth: the role of concreteness and familiarity.

This study examined factors that were posited to play an important role in the development of proverb comprehension in school-age children and adolescents, namely, the concreteness and the familiarity of the expressions. Normally achieving students enrolled in Grades 5, 8, and 11 (n = 180) were administered a written forced-choice task that contained eight instances of four different types of proverbs: concrete-familiar ("A rolling stone gathers no moss"); concrete-unfamiliar ("A caged bird longs for the clouds"); abstract-familiar ("Two wrongs don't make a right"); and abstract-unfamiliar ("Of idleness comes no goodness"). Performance on the task steadily improved as a function of increasing grade level and, as predicted, the expressions proved to be differentially challenging: Concrete proverbs were easier to understand than abstract proverbs, and familiar proverbs were easier to understand than unfamiliar proverbs. The results concerning concreteness support the "metasemantic" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through active analysis of the words contained in proverbs. The results concerning familiarity support the "language experience" hypothesis, the view that comprehension develops through meaningful exposure to proverbs.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment.

In this study we examined the influence of verbal working memory on sentence comprehension in children with SLI. Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive vocabulary (VM) completed two tasks. In the verbal working memory task, children recalled as many real words as possible under three processing load conditions (i.e., no-load condition; single-load condition, where words were recalled according to physical size of word referents; and dual-load condition, where words were recalled by semantic category and physical size of word referents). In the sentence comprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant (shorter) and linguistically redundant (longer) sentences. Results of the memory task showed that the children with SLI recalled fewer words in the dual-load condition than their CA peers, who showed no condition effect. The SLI and VM groups performed similarly overall, but both groups showed poorer recall in the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. On the sentence comprehension task, children with SLI comprehended fewer sentences of both types than the CA children and fewer redundant sentences relative to themselves and to the VM children. Results were interpreted to suggest that children with SLI (a) have less functional verbal working memory capacity (i.e., ability to coordinate both storage and processing functions) than their CA peers and (b) have greater difficulty managing both their working memory abilities and general processing resources than both age peers and younger children when performing a "complex" off-line sentence processing task.

Child↗

PubMed2000

The relationship between measures of working memory and sentence comprehension in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and age- and education-matched older volunteers were tested on a battery of working memory tests, as well as on two tests of sentence comprehension. Patients had reduced spans and impaired central executive processes in working memory but showed normal effects of phonological and articulatory variables on span. On the sentence comprehension tasks, DAT patients showed effects of the number of propositions in a sentence but not of syntactic complexity. Impairment in the central executive processes of working memory in DAT patients was correlated with the effect of the number of propositions in a sentence on the sentence comprehension tasks. The results suggest that patients with DAT have working memory impairments that are related to their ability to map the meanings of sentences onto depictions of events in the world.

Aged↗

PubMed2001

Comprehensive linkage map of bovine chromosome 27.

The results of genotypic data contributed to the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG) Bovine Chromosome 27 Workshop are presented. Eight laboratories contributed 23 261 informative meioses from 44 loci. Eighteen loci were typed by at least two laboratories and were used to construct a consensus linkage map. Twenty-one loci were subsequently incorporated into a comprehensive map. The sex-averaged consensus map covered 66.9 cM. The sex-averaged comprehensive map was 75.5 cM, while the female and male maps were 73.1 and 63.7 cM, respectively. Five loci were excluded from the analysis because of ambiguous position in the linkage group and a low LOD score (less than 2.0). Average distance between loci in the comprehensive map was 1.98 cM.

Animals↗

PubMed1995

Comprehensive ultrasound examination in a private perinatal practice.

A retrospective review of the types of patients seen and the accuracy of the diagnosis made was undertaken for patients referred for comprehensive ultrasound examination in a large private perinatal practice. A review of the perinatal ultrasound database, neonatal intensive care database, and hospital charts was done in 1338 patients referred to the perinatal ultrasound laboratory for comprehensive ultrasound examination during a 2-year period. Accuracy of the ultrasound diagnosis and relationships between structural anomalies seen on ultrasound examination and perinatal outcome was undertaken. Positive and negative predictive values for the ultrasonic diagnosis were 82% and 98%, respectively. There were 19 (1.4%) false-positive diagnoses and 38 (2.8%) false-negative diagnoses. There was a high correlation between structural anomalies and chromosomal anomalies, with 15 of the 87 infants (17.2%) with structural anomalies also having chromosomal anomalies. The accuracy of ultrasonic diagnosis for comprehensive examinations in a large private perinatal practice compared favorably with previous reports in the literature. The information presented in this study should be helpful to obstetric centers with similar patient populations.

Congenital Abnormalities↗

PubMed2002

The comprehensive midtrimester test: high-sensitivity Down syndrome test.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to develop a highly sensitive algorithm for midtrimester Down syndrome detection. STUDY DESIGN: Urine (hyperglycosylated human chorionic gonadotropin, beta-core fragment of human chorionic gonadotropin), serum (alpha-fetoprotein, human chorionic gonadotropin and unconjugated estriol [uE(3)]), and ultrasound biometry (nuchal thickness, humerus length, the presence of gross ultrasonographic anomalies), and maternal age were measured at genetic amniocentesis. Stepwise logistic regression analysis was used to identify the most significant markers. A multivariate Gaussian algorithm plus age was used to derive patient-specific Down syndrome risk. Sensitivity and false-positive rates at different risk thresholds and the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve were determined. A probability value of <.05 was significant. RESULTS: There were 568 study cases with 17 Down syndrome cases (3.0%). The mean (+/-SD) maternal and gestational ages for the study group were 36.9 (+/-3.5) years and 16.2 (+/-1.4) weeks, respectively. The significant markers were nuchal thickness (P =.0001), hyperglycosylated human chorionic gonadotropin(P <.001), and beta-core fragment (P <.002). Neither maternal age nor gross sonographic anomaly contributed significantly to Down syndrome detection. The comprehensive midtrimester test was extremely efficient for Down syndrome detection in advanced maternal age only cases with a sensitivity of 92.3% at a 0.8% false-positive rate. In women <35 years old, all the Down syndrome cases were detected at 2.2% false positive rate. For the overall population, the sensitivity was 93.7% at 5% false-positive rate. CONCLUSION: In a preliminary study, the comprehensive midtrimester test appeared highly sensitive in different age groups. Gross anomaly detection was not required for high performance, which makes the comprehensive midtrimester test potentially suitable for low-risk screening and as an alternative to amniocentesis in women who wish to avoid the procedure. This was a small study; thus, the clinical value of this test can only be established in large trials.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Costs and consequences of comprehensive stillbirth assessment.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine the consequences and costs of comprehensive stillbirth assessment. STUDY DESIGN: Through reconstruction, we determined what consequences arise from assessment in the first 1477 stillborn pregnancies that were referred to the Wisconsin Stillbirth Service Program. Economic costs of stillbirth assessment were derived from real-time studies of those who performed the analyses and the costs of materials that were consumed. RESULTS: When comprehensive, nonselective analysis is performed, new information that is relevant to recurrence risk estimation, prenatal diagnosis recommendation, or preconceptual, prenatal, perinatal, or neonatal treatment will arise in 51% of stillborn infants. The real cost of such assessment is approximately $1450 per assessment, or approximately $12 per cared-for pregnancy. CONCLUSION: Substantial relevant information can be learned from stillbirth assessment at a modest economic cost. Programs that can provide comprehensive stillbirth assessment services should become part of routine pregnancy care.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Comparison of health status of children using a school-based health center for comprehensive care.

OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to compare health problems and medical coverage of homeless and housed children who used a school-based health center (SBHC) for comprehensive care. METHODS: Medical charts of homeless children (n = 76) and housed children (n = 232) seen for comprehensive care at an SBHC in New York City during the 1998-99 school year were systematically reviewed and compared. RESULTS: Controlled for ethnicity and medical coverage, homeless children were 2.5 times as likely (P <.001) to have health problems and 3 times as likely (P <.001) to have severe health problems as housed children. The most common health problems identified in the homeless population were asthma (33%), vision (13%), mental health (9%), and acute problems (8%). Lack of medical coverage was evident in 58% of homeless children, compared with 15% of housed children (P <.001). CONCLUSION: Study findings identify homeless children as being at increased risk for health problems and lack of medical coverage. These findings support use of an SBHC for comprehensive care by underserved segments of the population and a need for increased vigilance on the part of health care providers caring for homeless children.

Adolescent↗