Children with specific oral language and reading problems have language processing difficulties which produce delays in their language development and in bringing language knowledge to conscious awareness. The long range goal of the research proposed is to develop age appropriate treatment procedures which will help these children to reduce or overcome their language processing difficulties.
the specific aims of the research are 1) to examine the development of the abilities of children with known specific oral or written language impairment to process varying aspects of language (phonology, lexicon, semantax and discourses), and the relations between patterns of development and oral language and reading performance and 2) to examine under which alterations in processing conditions these abilities can be improved during which periods of development. The changes in processing conditions that will be examined are a) provision of encoding strategies as the linguistic information is presented b) provision of retrieval cues as the material is recalled and c) changes in the amount of information to be processed. Forty children with specific language impairment and an equal number with reading problems in two age groups of (6 to 7 years and 9 to 10 years) will be followed for a three year period. Ten children in each group will be seen every nine months and the relation between these children's development of language processing abilities, as assessed by an experimental language processing battery, and their oral and written language performance on standard tests at the beginning and end of the study will be determined. Thirty children in each age group will be seen every eight to nine months and given the language processing tasks on the experimental battery under the altered conditions described above. The effects of these different conditions on language processing on the battery at different times in development and on standard tests of oral language and written language performance at the end of three years will be determined.
