The primary purpose of this study was to compare the ability of language-impaired and reading-impaired children to process (i.e., encode and retrieve) phonological information. Four measures of phonological awareness and several measures of word and sentence repetition abilities were used to evaluate phonological processing skills. Two additional measures assessed children's awareness of lexical and morphological information. Subjects were 12 language-impaired (LI), 12 reading-impaired (RI), and 12 normal children between the ages of 6 and 8 years. The findings supported previous claims that children with reading impairments have difficulty processing phonological information. To our surprise, however, the LI children performed significantly worse than the RI children on only three measures, all involving word and sentence repetition. These findings raise questions about the distinctiveness of school-age children with a history of language impairment and poor readers with no history of language impairment.

This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moderate hearing losses. We questioned whether degree of hearing loss or measures of language and phonological processing abilities were more likely to be related to novel word-learning ability. Subjects were 20 children with hearing impairment (M = 9:0) and 20 children with normal hearing (M = 6:5) matched for receptive vocabulary knowledge. Children were administered measures of language and phonological processing. The novel word-learning task consisted of an acquisition and retention phase in which children received a series of trials to learn to produce four novel words. Half of the children with hearing impairment performed comparably to the children with normal hearing on all of the measures obtained, whereas the other 10 children with hearing impairment performed more poorly than the higher functioning children with hearing impairment and all of the children with normal hearing on most of the measures of language, phonological processing, and novel word learning. Degree of hearing loss was not related to language or word-learning abilities. These findings suggest that the population of children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss may contain two distinct groups: a group of normally developing children who have a hearing loss and a group of children with language impairment who have a hearing loss. The implications of this categorization will be discussed.

Over- and underdiagnosis of language and literacy problems are common with low-socioeconomic status ethnically and racially diverse children. In recent years, a number of alternative assessment procedures have been developed that reduce some of the biases inherent in norm-referenced standardized tests. Problems and recent solutions to the use of norm-referenced testing will be discussed, with a focus on processing-dependent and dynamic assessment procedures.

In the present study, we further examined (see Kamhi & Catts, 1986) the phonological processing abilities of language-impaired (LI) and reading-impaired (RI) children. We also evaluated these children's ability to process spatial information. Subjects were 10 LI, 10 RI, and 10 normal children between the ages of 6:8 and 8:10 years. Each subject was administered eight tasks: four word repetition tasks (monosyllabic, monosyllabic presented in noise, three-item, and multisyllabic), rapid naming, syllable segmentation, paper folding, and form completion. The normal children performed significantly better than both the LI and RI children on all but two tasks: syllable segmentation and repeating words presented in noise. The LI and RI children performed comparably on every task with the exception of the multisyllabic word repetition task. These findings were consistent with those from our previous study (Kamhi & Catts, 1986). The similarities and differences between LI and RI children are discussed.

No abstract