language comprehension

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This book integrates research in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and neuropsychology to give a comprehensive picture of the process we call language "comprehension," right from the reception of an acoustic stimulus at the ear, up to the point where we interpret the message the speaker intended. A major theme of the book is that "comprehension" is not a unitary skill; to understand spoken language, one needs the ability to classify incoming speech sounds, to relate them to a "mental lexicon," to interpret the propositions encoded by word order and grammatical inflections, and to use information from the environmental and social context to select, from a wide range of possible interpretations, the one that was intended by the speaker.
The emphasis of this book is on children with specific language impairments, but normal development is also given extensive coverage. The focus is on research and theory, rather than practical matters of assessment and intervention. Nevertheless, while this book is not intended as a clinical guide to assessment, it does aim to provide a theoretical framework that can help clinicians develop a clearer understanding of what comprehension involves, and how different types of difficulty may be pinpointed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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This article reviews research on the use of situation models in language comprehension and memory retrieval over the past 15 years. Situation models are integrated mental representations of a described state of affairs. Significant progress has been made in the scientific understanding of how situation models are involved in language comprehension and memory retrieval. Much of this research focuses on establishing the existence of situation models, often by using tasks that assess one dimension of a situation model. However, the authors argue that the time has now come for researchers to begin to take the multidimensionality of situation models seriously. The authors offer a theoretical framework and some methodological observations that may help researchers to tackle this issue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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WHAT IS LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION?
Understanding what other people say and write (i.e., language comprehension) is more complicated than it might at first appear. Comprehending language involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes, knowledge, and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and signed language. In this broad sense, language comprehension includes reading comprehension, which has been addressed in a separate tutorial, as well as comprehension of sign language. (SeeTutorial on Reading Comprehension.) Deriving meaning from spoken language involves much more than knowing the meaning of words and understanding what is intended when those words are put together in a certain way. The following categories of capacity, knowledge, skill, and dispositions are all brought to bear in fully comprehending what another person says.
Communication Awareness
Communication awareness includes knowing (1) that spoken language has meaning and purpose, (2) that spoken words, the organization of the words, their intonation, loudness, and stress patterns, gestures, facial expression, proximity, and posture all contribute to meaning, (3) that context factors need to be taken into consideration in interpreting what people mean to communicate, (4) that it is easy to misinterpret another’s communication, and (5) that it often requires effort to correctly interpret another person’s intended meaning and that correct interpretation is worth the effort!
Hearing and Auditory Processing
Understanding a spoken utterance assumes that the listener’s hearing is adequate and that the spoken sounds are correctly perceived as phonemes of English (or whatever language is spoken). Phonemes are the smallest units of spoken language that make a difference to meaning – corresponding roughly to the letters in a word (e.g., the sounds that ‘t’, ‘a’, and ‘n’ make in the word ‘tan’). Auditory processing of language also includes the ability to integrate the separate sounds of a word into the perception of a meaningful word and of sequences of meaningful words.
Word Knowledge and World Knowledge
Word knowledge includes knowing the meaning of words (e.g., understanding them when they are spoken), including multiple meanings of ambiguous words. Knowing the meaning of a word is more than knowing what (if anything) that word refers to. Rather it is possession of a large set of meaning associations that comprise the word’s full meaning. For example knowing the meaning of the word “horse” includes knowing that horses are animals, that they engage in specific types of activities, that they have many uses, that they have specific parts, that they have a certain size, shape, and other attributes, that they are characteristically found in specific places, and the like. Understanding spoken language requires an adequate vocabulary, which is a critical component of the semantics of a language. Word meanings may be concrete (e.g., “ball” refers to round objects that bounce) or abstract (e.g., “justice” refers to fairness in the pursuit or distribution of various types of goods and services).
World knowledge includes understanding the realities in the world – objects and their attributes, actions and their attributes, people, relationships, and the like – that words refer to and describe. For example, if a student has no knowledge of computers, then it is impossible to fully understand the word ‘computer’.
Knowledge of Word Organization
Syntax (or grammar) refers to the rules that govern the organization of words in a sentence or utterance. Comprehending an utterance requires an ability to decipher the meaning implicit in the organization of words. For example, “Tom fed the dog” and “The dog fed Tom” have different meanings despite containing exactly the same words.
Morphology (a component of grammar) refers to rules that govern meaning contained in the structure of the words themselves. Changes within words (e.g., adding an ‘s’ to ‘dog’ to get ‘dogs’, or adding an ‘ed’ to ‘kick’ to get ‘kicked’) affects meaning. Comprehending an utterance requires an ability to decipher the meaning associated with such modifications of the words.
Discourse
Just as there are rules that govern how speakers put words together in a sentence to communicate their intended meaning, there are also rules that govern how sentences (or thoughts) are organized to effectively tell stories, describe objects and people, give directions, explain complex concepts or events, influence people’s beliefs and actions, and the like. These are called rules of discourse. Effective comprehension of extended language (e.g., listening to a story or a lecture) assumes that the listener has some idea of what to listen for and in what order that information might come.
Social Knowledge and Pragmatics
Pragmatics refers to the rules governing the use of language in context (including social context) for purposes of sending and receiving varied types of messages, maintaining a flow of conversation, and adhering to social rules that apply to specific contexts of interaction. On the comprehension side of communication, the first of these three types of rules is most critical. For example, comprehending the sentence, “I will do it” requires deciding whether the speaker intends to make a promise, a prediction, or a threat. Similarly “We’d love to have you over for dinner” could be an invitation, a statement of an abstract desire, or an empty social nicety. Or “Johnny, I see you’ve been working hard at cleaning your room” could be a description of hard work or a mother’s ironic criticism of Johnny for not working on his room. In each case, correct interpretation of the utterance requires consideration of context information, knowledge of the speaker, understanding of events that preceded the interaction, and general social knowledge. (See also the Tutorials onSocial Competence; Social Perception.)
Indirect Meanings include metaphor (e.g., “He’s a real spitfire”), sarcasm and irony (e.g., “You look terrific” said to a person who appears to be very sick), idioms or other figures of speech (e.g., “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”), hyperbole (e.g., “The story I wrote is about a million pages long!”), and personification (e.g., “Careful! Not studying for a test can jump up and bite you!”). Comprehending indirect meanings often requires abstract thinking and consideration of context cues. Students with brain injury often have significant difficulty deciphering the meaning of such indirect communication unless the specific use of words was familiar before the injury. Understanding new metaphors, figures of speech and the like makes significant demands on cognitive processing (e.g., working memory, reasoning), discussed next.
Cognitive Functions that Support Language Comprehension
Attention: Comprehending spoken language requires the ability to focus attention simultaneously on the speaker’s words and nonverbal behavior (e.g., gesture, facial expression, body posture), to maintain that focus over time, to focus simultaneously on ones own response, and to flexibly shift attentional focus as topics change.
Working Memory: Comprehending spoken language requires the ability to hold several pieces of information in mind at the same time, possibly including the words that the speaker just uttered, previous turns in the conversation, other information about the speaker, the topic, and the context, and the like.
Speed of Processing: Because the units of spoken language arrive in rapid succession, comprehension requires the ability to process information quickly.
Organization: Comprehending spoken language requires that the listener put together (i.e., organize) the various comments that the speaker makes, together with the listener’s own comments, background information, and the like. This assumes considerable organizational skill.
Reasoning: Comprehending a speaker’s intended meaning is often a reasoning process. For example, if a speaker says, “I’m really busy today” and later in the conversation says, “I can’t come over to your house after school today,” the listener should be able to reason that the speaker is not being rude in rejecting an invitation, but rather is unable to come over because of his busy schedule.
Abstract thinking ability: Comprehending abstract language, metaphors, figures of speech, and the like often requires a reasonable level of abstract thinking ability. (See Indirect Meanings, above.)
Perspective Taking: Comprehending the intent underlying a speaker’s message critically relies on the ability to take that person’s perspective. For example, when a speaker says, “Don’t worry; it’s not a problem,” he just might intend to communicate that it is a huge problem! Correctly interpreting this message requires “mind reading” – getting inside the speaker’s frame of reference and understanding the issues and the words from that person’s perspective.
Comprehension Monitoring and Strategic Behavior: Effective comprehension of spoken language requires routine monitoring of comprehension, detection of possible comprehension failures, a desire to fix breakdowns, and a strategic ability to repair the breakdown, for example by saying things like, “I’m not sure I understand what you mean; could you explain?”
In light of the wide variety of skills, knowledge, and dispositions that come together to support language comprehension, it is not surprising that language comprehension is a communication difficulty for many students, including many students with TBI.

WHY IS LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION IMPORTANT FOR MANY STUDENTS AFTER TBI?
Depending on age and location and severity of the brain injury, students with TBI can have varied profiles of strengths and weaknesses with components of language comprehension and language expression. Often, basic language knowledge and skills acquired before the injury, including word meanings, are recovered after the injury. However, children are commonly impaired in areas that are developing rapidly at the time of injury. For example, at ages 6, 7, and 8, children are learning vocabulary related to success in the classroom (e.g., the words that teachers use in giving instructions) and success in social life (e.g., the language of peer interaction, compliments, teasing, and the like). The transition into adolescence is similarly a time when new and abstract vocabulary and a new and complex social code are being learned. Therefore, an injury at those times may disrupt the process of learning and cause persisting problems with language comprehension in school and social life.
More generally, students with TBI often have problems with memory and new learning, related to damage to the vulnerable hippocampus and also to the frontal lobes. (See Tutorials on Memory, Retrieval.) Therefore, students injured at a relatively young age may have difficulty learning new words, rules of grammar, rules for organizing discourse, and pragmatic/social rules typically learned at older ages. The student may appear increasingly delayed in these areas over time. This gap between language knowledge and developmental expectations may become increasingly obvious in adolescence. Adolescents are expected to comprehend increasingly abstract and academic language, and also to comprehend increasingly subtle social language and nonverbal cues. A student injured before adolescence or in the early adolescent years may have difficulty in these domains and may therefore require intensive teaching and considerable support to meet these later developmental expectations as effectively as possible. (See Tutorials on Concrete versus Abstract Thinking; Social Perception, Social Competence.)
Because procedural learning tends to be better preserved after TBI than declarative memory, learning rules of grammar is often less problematic than learning new and abstract word meanings, and considerably less problematic than succeeding in the discourse and social pragmatic domains. (See Tutorial on Memory.) Both discourse and social pragmatic competence presuppose effective organization, reasoning, social perception and cognition, and working memory. Each of these cognitive domains is vulnerable following TBI.
Students with TBI also frequently have difficulties with other components of cognition and self-regulation that influence language comprehension. These include problems in the areas of attention, organization, reasoning, abstract thinking, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring. (See Tutorials on Attention; Organization; Concrete versus Abstract Thinking; Egocentrism; Self-monitoring.) Each of these areas of difficulty is associated with damage to the vulnerable frontal lobes. It is also extremely common for students with TBI to process information slowly. Slow processing can be caused by damage to the structure that connects the two halves of the brain (i.e., the corpus callosum), to the long axons that connect nerve cells (neurons) and networks of neurons throughout the brain, or to the frontal lobes themselves. (See the Tutorial on Slow Processing.)
Comprehending spoken language might not seem to be an organizational task, but consider what needs to be done to understand the following little story: “I went to a game yesterday with my dad. I caught a foul ball. I’m really happy to have the ball, but my hands still sting!” Understanding this story requires bringing to bear some background understanding of baseball. It also requires perceiving the relations among the sentences. For example the happiness and pain referred to in the third sentence relate to catching the ball referred to in the second sentence. Language comprehension is an ongoing process of “making connections” of this sort, connecting ideas to one another as the speaker expresses them and also to background knowledge of the world. Making these connections is difficult for students with organizational, memory, and reasoning impairments, common after TBI. (See Tutorials on Organization;Memory.)
Difficulty with the social aspects of language and language pragmatics, for effective expression and comprehension alike, is also common after TBI. In some cases this is due to the fact that the child was injured at a young age and may not have matured sufficiently to engage in effective social interaction with peers later in development. In other cases, difficulty with the social and pragmatic aspects of language is a direct result of damage to parts of the brain that facilitate processing of social information. Damage to vulnerable prefrontal areas, in association with the amygdala, parietal lobes, insula, anterior cingulate gyrus, and basal ganglia (possibly right hemisphere more than left) results in difficulty interpreting the emotional states of others and “reading” the non-literal aspects of their communication. (See Tutorials on Social Perception; Social Competence; Cognitive Egocentrism/Theory of Mind.)

WHAT ARE THE MAIN FEATURES OF INTERVENTION AND SUPPORT THAT ARE IMPORTANT FOR STUDENTS WITH LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS AFTER TBI?
Understanding the Problem
As always, step one in helping students with complex disability is understanding the problem. For example, difficulty with comprehension of language could be a consequence of weakness in any of the domains (outlined above) that contribute to successful comprehension. The problem exploration steps on this web site should help staff and family identify the factors associated with the student’s difficulties. Intervention and support can then be targeted to the set of problems known to contribute to the student’s difficulty with language comprehension
Environmental Compensations
Students with language comprehension problems should receive some combination of the intervention strategies outlined later in this tutorial to improve their comprehension. However, there are also compensatory environmental procedures or accommodations that might be useful in addition to more direct teaching strategies.
Understanding: Parents, teachers, other relevant adults, and possibly even peers should understand the nature of the student’s language comprehension weakness so that they will be in a position to make appropriate adjustments as they speak to the student, without speaking in a condescending or infantilizing manner.
Adjustments in the rate of speech: For students who process information (including language) slowly, adjustments should be made. This does not mean speaking each word slowly in a drone-like manner. Rather it means speaking clearly and allowing greater than normal pause time (processing time) between meaningful units of information (phrases or short sentences). However, for students with a significantly reduced attention span, slowing the rate of speech input may be counter-productive; the student’s attention may be lost. Lengthy instructions should be accompanied by simple written instructions or possibly picture cues to which the student can refer when necessary (assuming adequate reading ability for written instructions). If lecture notes are available in advance, the student can be “primed” for the content of the lecture in order to comprehend more effectively.
Adjustments in the amount of speech: For students who process information slowly or have difficulty organizing information, reasonable limits should be placed on the amount of information given at one time. After a few units of information, it may be useful to have the student summarize what she has understood of the information already given. Then the speaker can proceed. Lengthy instructions should be broken into parts and also accompanied by simple written instructions that the student can refer to when needed (assuming adequate reading ability), or pictured instructions. High school or college students who are required to take lecture courses may need condensed versions of the lectures – organized summaries – in written form or notes taken by an assistant teacher.
Adjustments in the abstractness of language: For students who are concrete thinkers and who have difficulty processing abstract meanings and abstract or indirect forms of language (e.g., metaphor, sarcasm), reasonable adjustments should be made. This does not mean eliminating abstract and indirect language from the speech directed to the student. Rather it means some combination of the following adjustments: (1) Use metaphors and figures of speech that you know the student understands, or accompany an unfamiliar metaphor or figure of speech with a simple embedded explanation (e.g., “John, you’re going to fall flat on your face if you don’t study... you know what I mean... you’ll fail and then be very unhappy”). (2) Similarly, words with abstract meanings should be accompanied by simple definitions built into the speech directed to the student (e.g., “The judicial branch of government is responsible for interpreting the laws, that is, judges and courts must decide exactly what a law means and whether a person or organization has broken the law”).
Supports for understanding social interaction: As explained in the tutorial on Social Perception, students who have difficulty understanding the intent of a speaker’s message may need to have that intent made explicit. For example, a communication partner may need to say “Let me tell you a joke...” rather than just telling the joke; or the communication partner may routinely add “Just kidding” after a tease rather than leaving it up to the student with social perception impairment to figure out that it is teasing. In these and other ways, communication partners can make their mental states known to the student with social perception and comprehension deficits.
Visual supports: Visual supports are useful for students with impaired comprehension of spoken language. These supports can range from visual schedules and ample gestural support for young students to written instructions and lecture summaries for older students. Some experimentation may be required to determine the appropriate mix of spoken language and visual supports.

Instructional Procedures
Teaching Word Knowledge and World Knowledge
Critical to comprehending the language that one hears is an understanding of the words that are spoken and at least a general understanding of the topics included in that language directed to the child. Students with TBI often retain their word knowledge (vocabulary) and general knowledge of the world acquired before the injury. Knowledge of this sort is stored in posterior brain regions, which are not especially vulnerable in TBI (closed head injury).
However, because of problems with new learning, the student may fall progressively further behind in vocabulary knowledge and world knowledge over the years after the injury. Therefore attention to both types of knowledge may be a component of the student’s comprehensive language and reading comprehension programs. What follows are some common suggestions regarding vocabulary acquisition and acquisition of world knowledge.
Vocabulary Practice: Words from the Curriculum: Given the many thousands of words that exist in any language, teaching vocabulary can seem to be a daunting task. For example, during the preschool years, typically developing children learn on average 8 to 10 words per day! The most reasonable way to simplify and organize the task of teaching vocabulary is to select words from the student’s academic and social curricula. Thus the words to be focused on by teachers, speech-language pathologists, special educators, and parents should be words that the student needs to learn in order to comprehend the language used in the classroom, on the playground, and at home. These include words that teachers use in giving instructions, words that peers use in play and other social interaction, and words from reading books and from science, social studies, and other content classes.
Teaching the meaning of a word includes exploring the many associations that comprise the word’s meaning. (See below for principles of vocabulary teaching.) In the case of a noun, for example, it is not sufficient for the student to point to a picture of the item when named. She should know what category the item falls into, what it does (if anything), what it is used for, what parts it has, what features it has, what it is made of, where it is commonly found, and other common associations. This broad and deep understanding is true knowledge of a word’s meaning. Thus teachers and therapists should teach word meaning in this organized associative manner. Furthermore, context is important in the teaching. Students should have exposure to a variety of contexts in which the word can be used, especially contexts relevant to the classroom curriculum.
Parents can use and explore targeted words and their meanings during dinner time, car time, and other relaxed conversational times. Teaching word meaning at home need not be a boring “school-like” activity, but rather conversational use and exploration of the word, using language at the student’s level of comprehension and connected as much as possible to the student’s interests. Home-school communication should include lists of words that are currently focused on in school. However, these lists should not be so long that the student and family are overwhelmed!
In addition, the more students read, the faster their vocabularies grow. Therefore there is a strong rationale for encouraging students to read as much as they can. Homes should have interesting and engaging reading materials at an appropriate reading level for the student. For example, topically interesting magazines are available at many reading levels, including sports, current events, and popular culture magazines. And students should be encouraged to request a definition when they encounter words they do not understand.
World Knowledge: Themes from the Curriculum: Given the infinite extent of possible knowledge of things, places, events, and people in the world, teaching world knowledge is a genuinely daunting task. Again, the most reasonable way to simplify and organize the task is to select themes from the student’s academic curriculum. General education teachers, special educators, therapists, and parents can focus on and discuss themes and issues that are found in reading texts or in the student’s content classes.
As in the case of word meanings, parents can help the child acquire relevant world knowledge by knowing what is being taught at school and then weaving those curricular themes into dinner time, car time, and other relaxed conversations. In addition, discussion of daily events presented in the newspaper or on TV can help the student broaden her horizons and learn about events occurring in the world. Furthermore, the more the student reads, the more she learns about the world; therefore fun reading beyond school assignments should be encouraged.
Principles of Vocabulary Instruction: The following eight principles of vocabulary instruction are paraphrases of principles of vocabulary instruction published by Roth (2002). These principles capture the best evidence-based practices known to language specialists at that time for teaching vocabulary to children who have language-learning difficulties, regardless of the cause of that difficulty. However, it may be that effectiveness of specific vocabulary teaching procedures is more dependent on the student’s age, nature of the impairment, and specific vocabulary objectives than this general list of procedures suggests.
Principle 1: Teach organized systems of word associations (i.e., semantic knowledge). Common word associations for a noun include what category the item falls into, what it does (if anything), what it is used for, what parts it has, what features it has, what it is made of, where it is commonly found, and other common associations. (See the Tutorial on Graphic Organizers for a description of an organizer used in teaching word meanings.)
Principle 2: Teach the student word-learning strategies. For a young student, this may mean asking “What’s that?” when encountering something unfamiliar. For a somewhat older student, this may mean getting into the habit of asking “What does _____ mean?” when encountering an unfamiliar word. For an older student, routine use of a dictionary should be added to these strategies.
Principle 3: Teaching vocabulary should include direct and explicit instruction as well as everyday incidental word learning.
Principle 4: Teaching vocabulary should involve relevant context associations and active child engagement with the to-be-learned meanings. A variety of activities and examples of the meaning should be included in the teaching.
Principle 5: Students need to learn the meanings of both common (high frequency) words and rare (low frequency) words.
Principle 6: Students need to learn both core definitions and also relevant context information. For example, when learning that “weird” means strange or unconventional, a student should also learn that it is offensive to apply the word to people.
Principle 7: To fully understand a word’s meaning, students should be given both examples and non-examples of that word’s meaning. For example, to understand the meaning of “red”, students should know what shades of color are called red and what shades are not called red; similarly, to understand the meaning of “legislative responsibilities”, students should know what the legislative branch of government is responsible for (e.g., writing laws), but also what it is not responsible for (e.g., interpreting the laws and determining their constitutionality).
Principle 8: Students typically learn most efficiently from a multidimensional approach, appealing to all of their senses and to their activity as they learn the word’s meaning. For example color words can be learned while finger painting; words related to government functions can be learned while having mock legislative and judicial sessions.
Roth also offers additional teaching suggestions: (1) Use adult-child shared book reading as a context for teaching vocabulary; (2) Incorporate new vocabulary into stories to heighten comprehension; (3) Use graphic organizers to facilitate comprehension; (4) With young children, focus on the physical action dimensions of meaning.
Improving Listening Comprehension By Teaching Strategies
The Tutorial on Reading Comprehension lists a number of strategies that students can use to improve their understanding of what they read. Some of these strategies can also be used by well selected students to improve their listening comprehension. However, teachers and clinicians should exercise caution in attempting to teach any of these listening comprehension strategies to students with restricted space in working memory. Thinking about strategies or using strategies may distract the student with brain injury, causing a reduction rather than an improvement in comprehension. Furthermore, some of the strategies, like requesting clarification, may be resisted by students who understandably do not want to call attention to their disability. Sensitive counseling may be a necessary component of this strategy instruction.
With these qualifications as background, listening comprehension strategies include:
Clarifying the topic or theme in what the communication partner is saying. This is analogous to the reading comprehension strategy of doing a “book walk” or in other ways orienting to the topic before reading.
Summarizing – out loud or silently – the main points in what the person is saying. This is analogous to the summarizing strategy in reading comprehension.
Elaborating – out loud or silently – on what the person is saying. This is analogous to the elaboration or self-questioning strategy in reading comprehension.
Creating a visual image to associate with the main point made by the person. This is analogous to the visual imagery strategy in reading comprehension.
Requesting repetition or clarification of what the other person has said. This is analogous to the reading comprehension strategy of re-reading a passage or requesting help.
Making a judgment about the meaningfulness or value of what the person has said. This is analogous to the parallel strategy in reading comprehension.
Teaching Rules of Grammar
In most cases of pediatric TBI, grammar is less problematic than vocabulary or the social/pragmatic domains of language. However, a child with TBI may also have a congenital language-learning disorder, or may be one of the few with specific language impairment (or aphasia) caused by the injury. Therefore we include in this tutorial the following principles of grammar instruction.
Principles of Grammar Instruction: The following ten principles of grammar instruction are paraphrases of principles published by Fey, Long, and Finestack (2003). These principles capture the best evidence-based practices known to language specialists at that time for teaching grammar to children who have language-learning difficulties, regardless of the cause of that difficulty. However, it may be that effectiveness of specific grammar teaching procedures is more dependent on the student’s age, nature of the impairment, and specific grammatical objectives than this general list of procedures suggests.
Principle 1: Make sure that the grammar being taught serves a communication purpose (e.g., in story telling, giving a description, and the like).
Principle 2: Do not focus teaching sessions only on grammar.
Principle 3: Choose a class of grammatical forms (e.g., past tense, rather than highly specific words) and ensure that there is environmental support for the meaning of the component of grammar being taught. For example, in teaching past tense, there should be meaningful conversation about events that took place in the past.
Principle 4: Choose developmentally appropriate forms of grammar. This requires consultation with a speech-language pathologist who knows in what developmental order children typically acquire aspects of grammar.
Principle 5: Create many natural opportunities throughout the day for supported practice.
Principle 6: Use varied linguistic contexts for practice of grammar, including conversation, descriptions, and stories (spoken and written).
Principle 7: Make the target aspect of grammar salient and meaningful. For example, in teaching helping verbs, create an argument like the following: “He is running” ... “No he isn’t” ... “Yes he is” ... “No he isn’t” and so on.
Principle 8: Make sure that relevant adults know how to use systematic recast procedures. For example, if the child says, “He goed to school”, the adult follows that utterance by saying, “He went to school”.
Principle 9: All adults should use grammatical language models, not “baby talk” or telegraphed models. Furthermore, relevant adults should know what specifically the child is working on so they can make a point of modeling those aspects of grammar.
Principle 10: Adults should use the traditional “You say what I say” imitation procedure sparingly. That is, avoid over-use of the following teaching procedure, “John, say after me, ‘He kicked the ball’ ... John imitates ... the adult says “Good job! He kicked the ball.” And when this imitation procedures is used, it should be supplemented by more natural language teaching procedures.

EVIDENCE REGARDING INTERVENTION FOR CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE DISORDERS
This summary of evidence is written for teachers and others who may be required to support their intervention practices with evidence from the research literature or who may simply be curious about the state of the evidence. This summary was written in early 2008. Evidence continues to accumulate.
A search of the literature revealed no studies of the effectiveness of language intervention for students with a diagnosis of TBI, other than those that focus on the behavioral dimensions of language. The summaries of vocabulary and grammar teaching procedures presented earlier (Fey et al., 2003; Roth, 2002) are taken from general reviews of state-of-the-art professional practice, not based on systematic reviews of the experimental literature. Therefore these summaries represent a useful point of departure in choosing teaching procedures, but they cannot be considered evidence reviews.
Specific evidence supporting language intervention for students with TBI can, therefore, only be drawn – with great caution – from studies of other populations of students. Cirrin and Gillam (2008) identified 21 studies of language intervention for school-age children with primary spoken language disorders (versus disorders of reading and writing, and disorders of language secondary to other disabilities) published since 1985. Each study met high standards of experimental rigor. No studies of middle and high school students were found. Six studies focused on vocabulary, three on grammar, five on phonological awareness and metalinguistics, five on general language processing, and two on pragmatics. Effect sizes were moderate to high for the majority of studies. Therefore the authors conclude that there is an unfortunately small but solid body of evidence for language intervention for elementary-age students with primary language disorders.
Jitendra and colleagues (2004) systematically reviewed the evidence supporting specific procedures for teaching reading vocabulary to students with learning disabilities, grades 4 through 12. They found 19 articles that included 27 separate experimental studies. The following vocabulary teaching procedures were supported by experimental evidence: cognitive strategy instruction (e.g., semantic feature analysis), visual imagery, direct instruction, error-free learning (i.e., gradually increasing the time delay between presenting the word and requesting a definition)(only one study), and activity-based methods (only one study). Computer-assisted instruction yielded mixed results. The respected evidence review of the National Reading Panel (2000) summarized the results of a large number of successful experimental studies that support the use of explicit instruction in teaching both reading vocabulary and comprehension, with a focus on strategy intervention in the case of comprehension.
Other reviews of language intervention for specific populations of students with disability include Goldstein (2002, autism), and Sigafoos and Drasgow (2003, developmental disabilities). The Goldstein review is relevant in that it identified many successful experimental studies in which the social dimensions of language were targeted or positive communication alternatives to negative behavior were taught. Although there are differences in central tendencies between autism and TBI, those two dimensions of communication intervention are also important for many students with TBI. The systematic evidence review of Ylvisaker and colleagues (2007) summarized several studies in which social language and positive communication alternatives were successfully taught to children and adults with TBI.
Cirrin, F.M., & Gillam, R.B. (2008). Language intervention practices for school-age children with spoken language disorders: A systematic review. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 39, S110-S137.
Fey, M., Long, S.H., & Finestack, L.H. (2003). Ten principles of grammar facilitation for children with specific language impairments. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 3-15.
Goldstein, H. (2002). Communication intervention for children with autism: A review of treatment efficacy. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 32(5), 373-396.
Jitendra, A., Edwards, L., Sacks, G., & Jacobson, L. (2004). What research says about vocabulary instruction for students with learning disabilities. Exceptional Children, 70(3), 299-322.
National Reading Panel (NRP) (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: national Institute of Child Health and Human Development and U.S. Department of Education.
Roth, F.P. (2002). Vocabulary instruction for young children with language impairments. Asha Division 1 (Language Learning and Education) Newsletter, October 2002.
Sigafoos, J. & Drasgow, E. (2003). Empirically validated strategies, evidence-based practice and basic principles in communication intervention for learners with developmental disabilities. Perspectives in Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 12, 7-10.
Ylvisaker, M., Turkstra, L., Coehlo, C., Yorkston, K., Kennedy, M., Sohlberg, M., & Avery, J. (2007). Behavioral interventions for individuals with behavior disorders after TBI: A systematic review of the evidence. Brain Injury, 21(8), 769-805.
Written by Mark Ylvisaker, Ph.D.
Last revised: April 2008

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We decided that the within subjects measure, away andtoward movement, could produce carryover effects in thesecond half of the experiment. The analysis thereforeincludes only the first half of the experiment. A regressionanalysis adjusted judgment times to control for sentencelength; these residual judgment times provide clearer dataand the focus of our interpretation, but both raw and residualdata were analyzed.We predicted that participants in the congruent-toward practice direction condition would have higher (slower) judgment times on toward sentences than away and participants in the congruent-away practice directioncondition would have higher judgment times on awaysentences than toward sentences. Although we did not havespecific predictions for participants in the incongruentcondition, it was expected that less MNS stimulation and, by extension, less fatigue, would occur than in the congruentcondition.A three-way ANOVA was conducted separately for rawand residual judgment times. In the raw judgment times,there was a main effect of sentence direction on judgmenttimes, F
(1, 69) = 10.33, p
= .002, showing longer judgmenttimes for toward sentence (M=1718, SD=336) than for awaysentences (M=1669, SD=305).Contrary to the hypothesis, the difference between theMirrored and Control conditions in raw judgment times onlyapproached significance, F (1, 69) = 3.48, p
= .066. Aninteraction between movement condition (Mirrored vs.Control) and practice direction (toward vs. away) alsoapproached significance, F
(1, 69) = 3.89, p =
.053. None ofthese interactions were significant in residual judgmenttimes.Critically, the expected three-way interaction of sentencedirection, practice direction, and movement condition wasfound in both raw [ F
(1, 69) = 4.60, p
= .035] and residual judgment times [ F
(1,69) = 6.01, p
= .017]. That is, theinteraction of action and language depended on themovement condition. Mean residual judgment times for thethree-way ANOVA are listed in Table 2.Table 2: Mean residual judgment times.Practice toward Practice awayMirrored conditionToward sentences 41.0 10.3Away sentences -43.5 -8.0Control conditionToward sentences -19.8 31.6Away sentences 18.7 -24.9To decompose the three-way interaction, we ran a 2-wayANOVA for Mirrored and Control conditions separately.The 2-way interaction was not significant for the Mirroredcondition in either raw or residual judgment times, but itwas significant for the Control condition in both raw [F(1,36)=7.86, p=.008] and residual judgment times[F(1,36)=6.88, p=.013].To identify the source of the 2-way interaction in theControl condition, we conducted dependent-samples t-tests.There was a significant difference between raw judgmenttimes for toward and away sentences after away practice[t(18)=3.420, p=.003], but not after toward practice[t(18)=.654, p=.522]. Similarly in residual judgment times,there was a significant difference between toward and awaysentences after away practice [t(18)=2.575, p=.019], but notafter toward practice [t(18)=1.235, p=.233].We are aware that there are other ways to analyze the datathat can take the nested design into consideration, and thesealternatives are currently being explored.
Discussion
The aim of this study was to test one potential mechanismof social language coordination. Our results indicate aninteraction between socially observed actions and language processing and support the hypothesis of Glenberg, Sato,and Cattaneo (2008) that action controllers in Broca’sregion are involved in comprehension of languagedescribing concrete or abstract transfer. This study also addsto this hypothesis, suggesting that action controller outputmay increase during observation of others’ similar actions.This finding implicates a mirror-neuron-like mechanism inmediating language comprehension and conversation.As predicted, the pattern of results in the Mirroredcondition indicates the fatigue of action controllers throughsimultaneous self-produced action and observation of actionin the MNS. Participants in the Mirrored-toward practicedirection, as expected, read toward sentences more slowlythan away sentences. Participants in the Mirrored-away practice condition similarly demonstrated the expected pattern, judging away sentences more slowly than towardsentences.In contrast, participants’ judgment times in the controlcondition seem to reflect the opposite, or a facilitationeffect. Participants in the Control-toward condition readtoward sentences faster than away sentences and participants in the Control-away condition read awaysentences faster than toward sentences. This finding issomewhat consistent with our prediction of a reducedfatigue effect in the control condition. We may attribute thediscrepancy to an adjustment in procedure. Whereas participants in the Glenberg, et al. (2008) study transferred600 beans in each condition, those in our study transferredonly 300. Thus, the Control condition activates actioncontrollers, although not to the point of fatigue. In this case,we would expect a pattern similar to an action-sentencecompatibility effect (ACE) in which reading times areshorter when there is a match between the direction ofmotor response and the direction implied by the sentence.The fatigue effect found in the Mirrored condition wouldhave resulted from the dual action and observation ofmovement, more closely approximating the experience ofmoving twice as many, or 600, beans.The findings are generally consistent with several areas ofresearch. The results support embodied theories of language
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comprehension in which action systems of the brain play arole in processing of language about actions (Glenberg &Kaschak, 2002). In particular, we replicate the findings ofGlenberg et al. (2008) in which action induced motor plasticity affected language processing. Here however, weextend the source of neural plasticity from action-inducedfatigue of action controllers to socially induced fatigue ofaction controllers, in which the MNS is the hypothesizedmechanism.Our findings differ from those of Glenberg et al. (2008) by revealing a U-shaped effect of motor practice on theoutput of action controllers, with smaller amounts of practice leading to facilitation, and larger amounts of practice leading to fatigue.Second, the findings support the existence of a MNS inhumans in which the observed actions of another are processed using the motor system of the observer(Rizzolatti, & Craighero, 2004). Studies of the human MNShave shown that action observation potentiates the executionof kinematically similar actions in an observer (Calvo et al.,2005; Stefan et al., 2005). Similarly, it was recently foundthat concurrent observation of a similar action not only produces a kinematically specific motor memory in theobserver, but also enhances the effect of training, relative to physical training alone (Stefan, Classen, Celnik, & Cohen,2008). We found that observation of a kinematically similaraction contributes to a fatigue-like effect associated withneural plasticity. To our knowledge, this is the firstdemonstration that action observation elicits practice-likeeffects in language comprehension.Third, the results are consistent with the view of languageas fundamentally a joint action (Clark, 1996) in whichsuccessful communication of meaning is achieved throughalignment of mental states (Garrod & Pickering, 2004;Pickering & Garrod, 2006).The results can also be compared with the literature on S-R compatility (e.g., the “Simon Effect”). Whereas thatliterature has shown that motor responses can reflect the“fatigue” of a spatial features of an irrelevant stimulus (e.g.Proctor & Lu, 1999), we show that such a fatigue effect can be modified by observation of another person doing arelated movement.This study suggests a mechanism by which alignmenttakes place, namely by the matching of motor states via themirror neuron system. Interlocutors converge in terms oflinguistic features, including grammatical structure (Bock;Branigan, 2000), word use, sematics (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), speech characteristics (Giles, H., Coupland, N., & Coupland, J., 1992), and phonetics (Pardo, J. S.,2006). But motor behavior also converges in socialinteraction (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), particularly whenthere is a desire to create rapport (Lakin & Chartrand,2003). Our results may shed light on the recent finding that physiological concordance correlates with client-therapist bond (Marci, Ham, Moran, & Orr, 2007). An interestingquestion is whether dyads in our study would report agreater sense of rapport in the Mirrored versus Controlcondition.Recent theory suggests that the function of the MNS is forinterpersonal coordination, rather than imitation of actions(Newman-Norlund, van Schie, van Zuijlen, & Bekkering,2007), although the evidence for this view is equivocal(Kokal, Gazzola, & Keysers, 2009). Because our movementconditions differed only in terms of the similarity ofmovement rather than the coordination required by the task,our results support the view that the MNS is involved inimitation. Nevertheless, understanding how the MNS interacts with brain mechanisms for interpersonal motor coordination islikely to shed light on how conversational alignmentsupports joint actions in communication.
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the invaluable researchassistance of Katie Krol, and Arbor Otalora-Fadner, andArthur Glenberg for his helpful comments and support.
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Academia © 2014 anguage and the brain Many people assume the physical basis of language lies in the lips, the tongue, or the ear. But deaf and mute people can also possess language fully. People who have no capacity to use their vocal cords may still be able to comprehend language and use its written forms. And human sign language, which is based on visible gesture rather than the creation of sound waves, is an infinitely creative system just like spoken forms of language. But the basis of sign language is not in the hand, just as spoken language is not based in the lips or tongue. There are many examples of aphasics who lose both the ability to write as well as to express themselves using sign-language, yet they never lose manual dexterity in other tasks, such as sipping with a straw or tying their shoes. Language is brain stuff--not tongue, lip, ear, or hand stuff. The language organ is the mind. More specifically, the language faculty seems to be located in certain areas of the left hemispheric cortex in most healthy adults. A special branch of linguistics, called neurolinguistics, studies the physical structure of the brain as it relates to language production and comprehension.
Structure of the human brain. The human brain displays a number of physiological and structural characteristics that must be understood before beginning a discussion of the brain as language organ. First, the cerebrum, consisting of a cortex (the outer layer) and a subcortex, is also divided into two hemispheres joined by a membrane called the corpus callosum. There are a few points which must be made about the functioning of these two cerebral hemispheres. 1) In all humans, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body; the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. This arrangement--calledcontralateral neural control is not limited to humans but is also present in all vertibrates--fish, frogs, lizards, birds and mammals. On the other hand, in invertibrates such as worms, the right hemisphere controls the right side, the left hemisphere controls the left side. The contralateral arrangement of neural control thus might be due to an ancient evolutionary change which occurred in the earliest vertibrates over half a billion years ago. The earliest vertibrate must have undergone a 180° turn of the brain stem on the spinal chord so that the pathways from brain to body side became crossed. The probability that such a primordial twist did occur is also born out by the fact that invertibrates have their main nerve pathways on their bellies and their circulatory organs on their backs, while all vertibrates have their heart in front and their spinal chord in back--just as one would expect if the 180° twist of the brain stem vis-a-vis the body did take place. 2.) Another crucial feature of brain physiology is that each hemisphere has somewhat unique functions (unlike other paired organs such as the lungs, kidneys, breasts or testicles which have identical functions). In other words, hemisphere function is asymmetrical. This is most strikingly the case in humans, where the right hemisphere--in addition to controlling the left side of the body--also controls spatial acuity, while the left hemisphere--in addition to controlling the right side of the body-- controls abstract reasoning and physical tasks which require a step-by-step progression. It is important to note that in adults, the left hemisphere also controls language; even in most left-handed patients, lateralization of language skills in the left hemisphere is completed by the age of puberty. Now, why should specialized human skills such as language and abstract reasoning have developed in the left hemisphere instead of the right? Why didn 't these skills develop equally in both hemispheres. The answer seems to combine the principle of functional economy with increased specialization. In nature, specialization for particular tasks often leads to physical asymmetry of the body--witness the lobster 's claws--where limbs or other of the body differentiate to perform a larger variety of tasks with greater sophistication (the same might be said to have happened in human society with the rise of different trades and the division of labor). Because of this specialization, one hemisphere--in most individuals for some reason it is the right hemisphere--came to control matters relating to 3D spatial acuity--the awareness of position in space in all directions simultaneously. Thus, in modern humans, artistic ability tends to be centered in various areas of the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, came to control patterns that progress step-by-step in a single dimension, such as our sense of time progression, or the logical steps required in performing feats of manual dexterity such as the process of fashioning a stone axe. This connects with right-handedness. Most humans are born with a lopsided preference for performing skills of manual dexterity with the right hand--the hand controlled by the left hemisphere. The left hand holds an object in space while the right hand mainpulates that object to perform tasks which require a step-by-step progression. Obviously, this is a better arrangement than if both hands were equally clumsy at performing complex, multi-step tasks, or if both sides of the brain were equally mediocre at thinking abstractly or at processing information about one 's three-dimensional surroundings. So human hemispheric asymmetry seems to have developed to serve very practical purposes. (By the way, left-handedness seems to be the result of inheritance of two copies of a gene which does not impart strong right-hand preference. The right-handed gene is dominant--in 25% of the population has no copy of this gene, presumably 12.5% percent of these non-handed individuals develop a righthandedness anyway, and 12.5% develop a tendency toward left handedness. At any rate, being left-handed doesn 't seem to have any special effect on language acquistion or learning or on anything else innate to humans.) This general pattern of cognitive asymmetry was probably well established in our hominid ancestors before the language faculty developed. So why did humans evolve in such a way that the language faculty normally localized in the left hemisphere? Why not in the right? Clearly, the reason is that language, like fashioning a stone axe, is also a linear process: sounds and words are uttered one after another in a definite progression, not in multiple directions simultaneously. In the modern human, the feature of monolineal progression seems naturally to ally language with other left brain skills such as the ability to perform complex work tasks, or abstract step-by-step feats of logic, mathematics, or reasoning. Even among natural left-handers (in about 12.5 % of any human population, language skills are localized in the cortex of the left hemisphere in all but about 2.5% of the cases. Some of these are individuals who received damage to the left hemisphere in childhood which, presumably, prevented language from localizing there; however, we don 't know why language localizes in the right hemisphere of the brain in about one in fifty healthy adults. Like right or left handedness, it seems to correlate with nothing else in particular. How do we know that the left hemisphere controls language in most adults. There is a great deal of physical evidence for the left hemisphere as the language center in the majority of healthy adults. 1) Tests have demonstrated increased neural activity in parts of the left hemisphere when subjects are using language. (PET scans--Positron Emission Tomography, where patient injects mildly radioactive substance, which is absorbed more quickly by the more active areas of the brain). The same type of tests have demonstrated that artistic endeavor draws normally more heavily on the neurons of the right hemispheric cortex. 2) In instances when the corpus callosum is severed by deliberate surgery to ease epileptic seizures, the subject cannot verbalize about object visible only in the left field of vision or held in the left hand.) Remember that in some individuals there seems to be language only in the right brain; in a few individuals, there seems to be a separate language center in each hemisphere.) 3.) Another clue has to do with the evidence from studies of brain damage. A person with a stroke in the right hemisphere loses control over parts of the left side of the body, sometimes also suffers a dimunition of artistic abilities. But language skills are not impaired even if the left side of the mouth is crippled, the brain can handle language as before. A person with a stroke in the left hemisphere loses control of the right side of the body; also, 70% of adult patients with damage to the left hemisphere will experience at least some language loss which is not due only to the lack of control of the muscles on the right side of the mouth--communication of any sort is disrupted in a variety of ways that are not connected with the voluntary muscles of the vocal apparatus. The cognitive loss of language is called aphasia, and we will discuss various types of aphasia in great detail tomorrow; only 1% of adults with damage to the right hemisphere experience any permanent language loss. Aphasics can blow out candles and suck on straws, even sing and whistle, but they cannot produce normal, creative speech in either written, spoken, or gestural form. Sign language users also store their linguistic ability in the left hemisphere. If this hemisphere is damaged, they cannot sign properly, even though they may continue to be able to use their hands for such things as playing the drums, giving someone a massage, or other non-linguistic hand movements. Injury to the right hemisphere of deaf persons produces the opposite effect.
Experiments on healthy individuals with both hemispheres intact. 4.) In 1949 it was discovered that if sodium amytal is injected into the left carotid artery, which services blood to the left hemisphere, language skills are temporarily disrupted. If the entire left hemisphere is put to sleep, a person can think but cannot talk. 5.) If an electrical charge is sent to certain areas of the left hemisphere (exactly which areas we will discuss tomorrow), the patient has difficulty talking or involuntarily utters a vowel-like cry (although the production of specific speech sounds has never been induced by electrical charge). An electrical charges to the right hemisphere produces no such effect. 6.) Musical notes and tones are best perceived through the left ear (which is connected to the spacial-acuity-controlling right hemisphere. In contrast, the right ear better perceives and processes the sounds of language, even linguistic tones (any form with meaning); the right ear takes sound directly to the left hemisphere language center. 7.) When repeating after someone, most individuals have a harder time tapping with the fingers of the right hand than with the left hand. /Perform this experiment in class./ 8.) The language centers in the left hemisphere of humans actually make the left hemisphere bulge out slightly in comparison to the same areas of the right hemisphere. This is easily seen without the aid of the microscope. For this reason, some neurolinguists have called humans the lopsided ape. Some paleontologists claim to have found evidence for this left-hemispheric bulging in Homo neanderthalus and Homo erectus skulls. Other primates also possess a left perisylvian area of the brain, but it doesn 't seem to be involved in their communication. Animal communication seems in fact to be controlled by the subcortical areas of the animal brain, much like human vocalizations other than language--laughter, sobbing, crying, as well as involuntary, word-like exclamations which do form part of language--are controlled in humans in the subcortex, a phylogenetically older portion of the brain that is involved with emotions and reflex responses. Tourette 's syndrome, which produces random and involuntary emotive reflex responses, including vocalizations This type of disorder, which often affects language use, is caused by a disfunction in the subcortex. There is no filter which prevents the slightest stimulus from producing a vocal response, sometimes of an inappropriate manner using abusive language or expletives. These words are involuntary and often the affected individual is not even aware of uttering them (like "um" in many individuals) and only realizes it when video is played back. This syndrome is not so much a language disorder per se as a disorder of the filters on the adult emotional reflex system--a kind of expletive hiccup. True language is housed in the cortex of the left hemisphere, not in the subcortical area that controls involuntary responses.
What can language disorders tell us about the brain 's language areas? Certain types of brain damage can affect language production without actually eliminating language from the brain. A stroke that damages the muscles of the vocal apparatus may leave the abstract cognitive structure of language intact--as witnessed by the fact that right hemisphere stroke victims often understand language perfectly well and write it perfectly with their right hand--although their speech may be slurred due to lack of muscle control. We have also seen that certain disorders involving the subcortex--the seat of involuntary emotional response--may have linguistic side effects, such as in some cases of Tourette 's syndrome. But what happens when the areas of the brain which control language are affected directly, and the individual 's abstract command of language is affected? We will see that language disorders can shed a great deal of light on the enigma of the human language instinct.
SLI. One rare language disorder seems to be inborn rather than the result of damage to a previously normal brain. I have said that children are born with a natural instinct to acquire language, the so-called LAD; however, a tiny minority of babies are born with an apparent defect in this LAD. Certain families appear to have a hereditary language acquisition disorder, labeled specific language impairment, or SLI. Children born with this disorder usually have normal intelligence, perhaps even high intelligence, but as children they are never able to acquire language naturally and effortlessly. They are born with their window of opportunity already closed to natural language acquisition. These children grow up without succeeding in acquiring any consistent grammatical patterns. Thus, they never command any language well--even their native language. As children and then as adults, their speech in their native language is a catalog of random grammatical errors, such as: It 's a flying birds, they are. These boy eat two cookie. John is work in the factory. These errors are random, not the set patterns of an alternate dialect: the next conversation the same SLI-afflicted individual might say This boys eats two cookies. These sentences, in fact, were uttered by a British teenager who is at the top of his class in mathematics; he is highly intelligent, just grammar blind. SLI sufferers are incapable of perfecting their skills through being taught, just as some people are incapable of being taught how to draw well or how to see certain colors. This is the best proof we have that the language instinct most children are born with is a skill quite distinct from general intelligence. Because SLI occurs in families and seems to have no environmental cause whatsoever, it is assumed to be caused by some hereditary factor--probably a mutant, recessive gene that interferes with or impairs the LAD. The precise gene which causes SLI has yet to be located.
SUMMARY
Let 's sum up three important facts about language and brain. First, humans are born with the innate capacity to acquire the extremely complex, creative system of communication that we call language. We are born with a language instinct, which Chomsky calls the LAD (language acquisition device). This language aptitude is completely different from inborn reflex responses to stimuli as laughter, sneezing, or crying. The language instinct seems to be a uniquely human genetic endowment: nearly all children exposed to language naturally acquire language almost as if by magic. Only in rare cases are children born without this magical ability to absorb abstract syntactic patterns from their environment. These children are said to suffer from Specific Language Impairment, or SLI. It is thought that SLI is caused by a mutant gene which disrupts the LAD. The LAD itself, of course, is probably the result of the complex interaction of many genes--not just one--and the malfunction of some single key gene simply short-circuits the system. For example, a faulty carburetor wire may prevent an engine from running, but the engine is more than a single carburetor wire. Many thousands of genes contribute to the makeup of the human brain--more than to any other single aspect of the human body. To isolate the specific set of genes that act as the blueprint for the language organ is something no one has even begun to do. Second, the natural ability for acquiring language normally diminished rapidly somewhere around the age of puberty. There is a critical age for acquiring fluent native language. This phenomenon seems to be connected with the lateralization of language in the left hemisphere of most individuals--the hemisphere associated with monolinear cognition (such as abstract reasoning and step-by step physical tasks) and not the right hemisphere, which is associated with 3D spatial acuity, artistic and musical ability. Unlike adults, children seem to be able to employ both hemispheres to acquire language. In other words, one might say that children acquire language three-dimensionally while adults must learn it two dimensionally. Third and finally, in most adults the language organ is the perisylvian area of the left hemispheric cortex. Yesterday we discussed the extensive catalog of evidence that shows language is usually housed in this specific area of the brain. Only the human species uses this area for communication. The signals of animal systems of communication seem to be controlled by the subcortex, the area which in humans controls similar inborn response signals such as laughter, crying, fear, desire, etc.
Aphasia
We know which specific areas of the left hemisphere are involved in the production and processing of particular aspects of language. And we know this primarily from the study of patients who have had damage to certain parts of the left hemispheric cortex. Damage to this area produces a condition calledaphasia, or speech impairment (also called dysphasia in Britain). The study of language loss in a once normal brain is called aphasiology. Aphasia is caused by damage to the language centers of the left hemisphere in the region of the sylvian fissure. Nearly 98% of aphasia cases can be traced to damage in the perisylvian area of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. Remember, however, that in the occasional individual language is localized elsewhere; and in children language is not yet fully localized. Strokes cause 85% of all aphasia cases; other causes include cerebral tumors and lesions. One in 200 people experiences aphasia, with males more at risk. Gradual recovery is possible in 40% of adult cases; pre-pubescent children are much more likely to recover from aphasia, with the language faculty localizing in another, unaffected area of the brain, usually the perisylvian cortex of the right hemisphere. Generally, the more extensive the injury, the greater the likelihood of permanent damage. But we have seen that language is a complex of interacting components--consonants and vowels, nouns and verbs, content words and function words, syntax and semantics. Could it be that these components are housed in particular sub-areas of the left hemisperic perisylvian cortex? We haven 't pinpointed whether nouns are stored separately from verbs, or where the fricative sounds are stored. There is no conclusive proof for that type of specialization of brain tissue. But there is compelling evidence to believe that two special aspects of language structure are processed by different sub-areas of the language center. We know this because damage to specific areas of the peresylvian area produces two basic types of aphasia. Each of these two types of language loss is associated with damage to a particular sub-region of the perisylvian area of the left hemispheric cortex. (1861) Paul Broca discovered Broca 's area (located in the frontal portion of the left perisylvian area) which seems to be involved in grammatical processing. (While parsing sentences such as fat people eat accumulates, there is a measurable burst of neural activity in Broca 's area when the last word is spoken.) Broca 's area seems to process the grammatical structure rather than select the specific units of meaning. It seems to be involved in the function aspect rather than the content areas of language) Broca 's aphasia involves difficulty in speaking. For this reason it is also known as emissive aphasia. Broca 's aphasics can comprehend but have great difficulty replying in any grammatically coherent way. They tend to utter only isolated content words on their own. Grammatical and syntactic connectedness is lost. Speech is a labored, irregular series of content words with no grammatical morphemes or sentence structure. (Read example) Grammar rules as well as function morphemes are lost. Broca 's aphasia is also known as agrammatic aphasia. Grammar is destroyed; the lexicon more or less preserved intact. (1875) Karl Wernicke: Wernicke 's area (in the lower posterior part of the perisylvian region) controls comprehension, as well as the selection of content words. When this area is specifically damaged, a very different type of aphasia usually results, one in which the grammar and function words are preserved, but the content is mostly destroyed. Since Wernicke 's aphasia involves difficulty in comprehension, in extracting meaning from a context, it is also known as receptive aphasia. Wernicke 's aphasics easily initiate long-winded, fluent nonsense, but don 't seem able to respond specifically to their interlocutor (unlike Broca 's aphasics, who can understand but the have difficulty replying). Wernicke 's aphasics often talk incessantly and tend to utter whole volumes of grammatically correct nonsense with relatively few content words or with jibberish words like "thingamajig" or "whatchamacallit" instead of true content words. (Read example.) Because Wernicke 's aphasia patients can utter whole monologs of such contentless grammatical babble, hardly letting their interlocutor get a word in edgewise, their affliction is also known as jargon aphasia. The normal human mind uses both areas in unison when speaking. Apparently, normal adults use the neurons of Wernicke 's area to select sounds or listemes. We use the neurons of Broca 's area to combine these units according to the abstract rules of phonology and syntax--the elements in language which have function but no specific meaning-- to produce utterances.
Review:
Broca 's aphasia--emissive aphasia--agrammatic aphasia: difficulty in encoding, in building up a context, difficulty in using the grammatical matrix of phrase structure, difficulty in using the elements and patterns of language without concrete meaning. Broca 's area apparently houses the elements of language that have function but no specific meaning--the syntactic rules and phonological patterns, as well as the function words--that is, the grammatical glue which holds the context together.
Wernicke 's aphasia--receptive aphasia--jargon aphasia: difficulty in decoding, in breaking down a context into smaller units, as well as in selecting and using the elements of language with concrete meaning. Wernicke 's area apparently houses the elements of language that have specific meaning--the content words, the lexemes--that is, the storehouse of prefabricated, meaningful elements which a speaker selects when filling in a context. Let 's review what these two areas--Broca 's and Wernicke 's seem to be telling us about the way language is stored in the brain. Language obviously consists of these two aspects working together in unison: 1) a very large but finite number of elements with specific form and meaning (morphemes, words, phrases--the lexicon, or set of listemes, on the other hand--). These ready-made elements seems to be stored in Wernicke 's area. 2) a fairly small number of patterns with virtually no limit on the specific meaning they can express (the phonology and syntax--the grammar of language, the abstract blueprint by which the prefabricated units of Wernicke 's area are combined). These abstract patterns seem to be stored in Broca 's area. Roman Jakobson, a Russian born linguist who made extensive studies of aphasia in the 1950 's, noted that both types of the aphasic lose language in the exact reverse order that language is acquired by a child-- -s of plays, the genitive 's, then finally plural s. This is true of the sound pattern, as well. In instances of gradual, progressive degeneration of the language centers of the left hemisphere, the aphasic 's loss of phonology is the mirror image of the acquisition of elements in childhood. These two areas have been implicated even more broadly with the human abilities to deal with signs. Roman Jakobson also noted that normal language function involves an interaction of two different associative properties of meaning: association by contiguity and association by similarity. (

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Language and the Brain
Of course, language is a function of the peculiar structure of the human brain. Several areas of the brain have been identified with linguistic skills, such as producing and understanding speech. Furthermore, people with brain damage in specific areas have difficulties with very specific aspects of language, implying that it is a highly compartmentalized process. Furthermore, human brains are functionally asymmetrical, concentrating many areas essential for speech production in one hemisphere.
The Structure of the Brain
In many animals that use sound for communication, the brain is lateralized, placing the control of sound production in one hemisphere of the brain (usually the left); this takes place quite strongly in songbirds and somewhat in monkeys, dolphins, and mice. The phenomenon of lateralization is extremely strong in humans, and in the vast majority language areas are concentrated in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere controls language in only about 3% of right-handers and 19% of left-handers, and another 68% of left-handers have language circuitry in both hemispheres.
There are two major areas of the human brain that are responsible for language: Broca 's area, which is though to be partially responsible for language production (putting together sentences, using proper syntax, etc.) and Wernicke 's area, which is thought to be partially responsible for language processing (untangling others ' sentences and analyzing them for syntax, inflection, etc.). Other areas involved in language are those surrounding the Sylvian fissure, a cleavage line separating the portions of the brain that are exclusively human from those we share with other animals. In general, the areas that control language would be adjacent to one another if the human brain was laid out as a flat sheet.
Broca 's Aphasia
When people experience damage to Broca 's area or its surroundings, their disorder is called Broca 's aphasia. As predicted by the central role of Broca 's area in language production, Broca 's aphasics produce slow, halting speech that is rarely grammatical. Typical Broca 's aphasics eliminate inflections such as -ed and words not central to the meaning of the sentence, such as the andand. They generally retain their vocabularies and have no difficulty naming objects or performing other meaning-related tasks. In general, they can deduce the meanings of sentences from general knowledge, but cannot understand sentences whose syntax is essential to their meaning. They are fully aware of their difficulties and the rest of their faculties are unimpaired.
The difficulties experienced by Broca 's aphasics reveal that Broca 's area is central to correct processing and production of grammatical information. However, some Broca 's aphasics retain certain grammatical abilities, including the ability to process certain types of syntax. Moreover, the difficulty that Broca 's aphasics experience in actual production of speech is also enigmatic; a problem that affected exclusively grammar would not necessarily create difficulty in speaking - only in speaking grammatically. As a result, Broca 's area is clearly involved in grammar and language, but there may be other areas in the brain with overlapping functions, and it may not be the seat of all grammatical processing power.
Wernicke 's Aphasia
When people experience damage to Wernicke 's area, the result is a disorder called Wernicke 's aphasia, which is in some ways the opposite of Broca 's aphasia. Wernicke 's aphasics are able to produce generally grammatical sentences, but they are often nonsensical and include invented words. Wernicke 's aphasics show few signs of understanding others ' speech, and have difficulty naming objects; they commonly produce the names of related objects or words that sound similar to the object 's name.
The symptoms experienced by Wernicke 's aphasics seem to support the idea that Wernicke 's are is related to the correct processing of others ' communication. It also implies that Wernicke 's area could be involved in the retrieval of words from the mental dictionary.
Other Types of Aphasia
Other types of aphasia noted in brain-damaged patients produce even stranger results. If Wernicke 's and Broca 's area are disconnected, patients cannot repeat sentences they have just heard. This implies that perhaps Wernicke 's area, which has processed the sentence heard, is unable to communicate it to Broca 's area for repetition. In another type, Wernicke 's and Broca 's areas remain connected but cannot communicate with the rest of the brain. These patients can only repeat sentences; they cannot speak spontaneously. This suggests that Wernicke 's and Broca 's areas are doing their jobs, but are not receiving input about what to talk about from the rest of the brain and are therefore paralyzed except when others produce speech.
Looking Further: Links and References
The following links and references are useful in the study of the relationship between language ability and brain structure.
Books
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Words and Rules by Steven Pinker
Websites
Chapters 3 and 8 of The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
Language Miniatures - collection of language essays by William Z. Shetter

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You are here: Home / Academics / School of Education and Counseling Psychology / About the School / Madalienne Peters, Ed.D. /Comprehension: Theories and Strategies
COMPREHENSION: THEORIES AND STRATEGIES
Mike Casper
Julie Catton
Sally Westfall
Dominican College
School of Education
October 2, 1998
INTRODUCTION
The main purpose for reading is to comprehend the ideas in the material. Without comprehension, reading would be empty and meaningless. In our practicum, we have all witnessed cases where students are capable of reading the words, but face much difficulty in expressing their comprehension of the main ideas. An example of this occurrence was a second grade boy named Reggie who loved to read but had difficulty in comprehending what he read. Reggie would eagerly read to an audience since he had a solid grasp of phonemic awareness (sounding out words) and social discourse (reading with expression). When tested by the Reading Specialist, Reggie was placed in a relatively low level reading group. This was due to his inability to demonstrate comprehension of the reading material. This was shocking to the teacher, as he appeared to be a strong reader.
As educators, we need to have an understanding of the theories behind reading comprehension, as well as a working knowledge of some important strategies that can be used in the classroom to increase reading comprehension. In this paper, we are going to focus on three important theories on reading comprehension: the Schema Theory; Mental Models, and the Propositional Theory, and four categories of strategies to improve reading comprehension based on these theories: Preparational, Organizational, Elaboration, and Monitoring.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
THEORY
Gunning (1996) identifies three main theories of reading comprehension. These theories are Schema Theory, Mental Models, and Proposition Theory.
Schema Theory
Gunning (1996) defines a schema as the organized knowledge that one already has about people, places, things, and events. Kitao (1990) says the schema theory involves an interaction between the reader’s own knowledge and the text, which results in comprehension. This schema, as Gunning defined, can be very broad, such a schema for natural disasters, or more narrow, such as a schema for a hurricane. Each schema is "filed" in an individual compartment and stored there. In attempting to comprehend reading materials, students can relate this new information to the existing information they have compartmentalized in their minds, adding it to these "files" for future use. Based on the Schema Theory, depending on how extensive their "files" become, their degree of reading comprehension may vary.
Mental Model Theory
Another major theory we would like to discuss is the Mental Model. This model can be thought of as a mind movie created in one 's head, based on the reading content. Gunning gives a detailed description of this process, stating that a mental model is constructed most often when a student is reading fiction. The reader focuses in on the main character and creates a mental model of the circumstances in which the character finds him or herself. The mental model is re-constructed or updated to reflect the new circumstances as the situation changes, but the items important to the main character are kept in the foreground according to Gunning, (1996).
Perkins (1991) identifies that sometimes misconceptions about important concepts reflect misleading mental models of the topic itself or the subject matter within which it sits. There are, however, interventions the teacher can do to help the reader to stay on track and create a more accurate picture. One suggestion is for the teachers to ask the students to disclose their mental models of the topics in question, through analogy, discussion, picturing, and other ways. This information gives the teacher insight on the student 's knowledge gaps and misconceptions, therefore allowing them to help students reconstruct a more accurate picture.
Proposition Theory
The final explanation of comprehension we would like to discuss is the Propositional Theory. This involves the reader constructing a main idea or macrostructure as they process the text. These main ideas are organized in a hierarchical fashion with the most important things given the highest priority to be memorized (Gunning, 1996).
STRATEGIES
Katims (1997) stated that learning strategies are techniques, or routines that enable students to learn to solve problems and complete tasks independently. A strategy is an individual’s approach to a task. Gunning (1996) identifies four main types of comprehension strategies, which include Preparational, Organizational, Elaboration and Monitoring.
Preparational
Gunning (1996) describes Preparational strategies as those that activate prior knowledge about a particular topic. This method is used to get students thinking about the topic they are about to work on. It is much easier to retain knowledge about a subject when the student is familiar with the subject area.
Gunning (1996) identifies predicting as a type of Preparational strategy which involves previewing parts of the text to be read. The portions of text, which are helpful in previewing, can be pictures, titles, or the cover of the book. As the students are thinking about what will happen based on their knowledge of the subject and the book, they focus their thoughts on the assignment to come, which leads to better comprehension.
Organizational
Gunning (1996) describes Organizational strategies as the process of selecting important details and building relationships from them. These strategies include: identifying the main idea and topic sentences, classifying information, deciding which information is relevant, sequencing and summarizing. Each of these strategies is complex and methods for improving them need to be taught starting from basic ideas and gradually getting more difficult. Summarizing, in particular, has been identified as a difficult skill to develop.
Elaboration
Gunning (1996) refers to elaboration as an additional processing of the text, by the reader, which may increase comprehension. It involves forming connections between the text and the reader’s background knowledge of the subject. Making inferences, picturing images and asking questions are all types of elaboration strategies.
Huffman (1998) identifies K-W-L as an elaboration strategy, which connects background knowledge to the topic to be addressed. K-W-L is an acronym for the three steps of the procedure: describing what we Know, what we Want to know, and what we Learned. The first two steps are completed before the project has begun, to assess background information, and the third step is completed afterward to make the connections.
Monitoring
Gunning (1996) defines monitoring as being aware of one’s own mental process when reading. Monitoring is an advanced technique that involves a great deal of independent thinking. Monitoring occurs when a reader is aware that they do not understand what was just read. The act of monitoring is knowing how to go back and find a way to gain understanding of the topic. Monitoring is knowing when to use the three other types of reading comprehension strategies.
CONCLUSIONS
It is interesting to note how intertwined the three theories are. Each one supports the other. In order to form a mental model in one’s head; one must have a schema of that topic already stored. According to the Proposition theory, the student is forming a mental model in their mind as they are forming the macrostructure.
Forming a schema is the most basic comprehension tool used by students. As they become more advanced, they can build on their base of schemas and create mental models throughout the reading. The most complex comprehension tool is forming a series of propositions, which are constantly updated throughout the text.
The four types of strategies previously discussed can be seen as more independent of each other than the theories, although a student is not able to apply the most complex strategy until they have a base of the more simplistic strategies. Preparational strategies happen before the actual reading takes place, and are incorporated in the Schema theory. Organizational strategies take place during and after the text is read. These strategies are based on both the Mental Model theory and the Proposition Theory. Elaboration strategies can take place before, during and after reading, and therefore, are dependent on all three major comprehension theories. Monitoring strategies are the most complex and involve mostly the Propositional theory. These strategies should take place primarily as the reading is taking place.
IMPLICATIONS
We believe that a child will make use of all three major theories as a means of reading comprehension, through the strategies, which are the responsibility of the educator to teach. The four main types of strategies can be extremely useful, and should be taught from the beginning of a student’s school career. Teaching of the strategies should start out at a simple level and increase in difficulty as the student masters it.
In order for the Schema theory to be effective, the student must have knowledge of the subject they are to discuss. We may assume that if a child has little background knowledge on a subject, they will have difficulty in comprehending readings regarding that subject. Students sharing with the class their own schemas could alleviate this. If a student had no prior knowledge of a subject, they could begin to build their schema based on their classmate’s experiences.
The Mental Model theory seemingly relies the heaviest on the Spatial Intelligence area in Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory (Armstrong 1994). Therefore, this model may not be as affective for non-spatial learners. Teaching the process of how a mental picture is formed could develop this skill. Taking information about the main character as it comes through the readings and writing descriptive pieces on that character would be a way to improve this skill and work towards increasing comprehension.
The Proposition theory works hand in hand with Organizational strategies such as remembering only the relevant information, or identifying the main idea. These are skills widely taught throughout schools as well as seen on standardized tests.
We have all seen evidence of Preparational strategies being used throughout all elementary grades. Pre-readers can comprehend a story by looking at the pictures. A teacher might show a book to beginning readers before the actual reading begins to give them a focus for their reading. In the fifth grade, students are asked to record their predictions about what will happen in the next chapter of the novel that they are reading. After they have read the chapter, they can revisit their predictions to see how accurate they were.
Students cannot help making use of Elaboration strategies when they are reading a piece about family. They naturally tend to relate what they are reading to their own family experience, comparing and contrasting aspects from the story to their own lives. Being able to do this increases one’s comprehension, because the reading material becomes relevant and meaningful. Take for example, a child who has to read a piece on making cornbread but they had never tasted or seen cornbread before. The reading would not have as much relevance to them. Being able to form a picture in one’s head of the setting or situation would also make the reading more interesting to a student, therefore increasing comprehension. For example, if a student had no concept of what it would look like to fight a battle, they would have a harder time keeping their interest level up when reading about an important historical battle scene.
Monitoring strategies involve awareness that the purpose of reading is to derive meaning. If someone is just reading to get the words right, comprehension will be very limited. When students are able to monitor themselves and check their own understanding of the text, comprehension will increase. Teachers promote monitoring strategies with the use of worksheets that students fill in as they read a piece. When the question asks the student to provide examples of a section of the story, which has a conflict, they have to think back to see if they understood a conflict was going on. If they don’t remember, they will go back and find that spot. Eventually, this skill should become second nature to a reader. When they come to the resolution in a story, but the reader wasn’t clear on the conflict, they should go back on their own to clarify what is being resolved.
It would be beneficial to do further research on what type of strategy work most effectively at each grade level. In addition, we are interested in examining which theories and strategies apply most accurately to each content area.
REFERENCES
Gunning, Thomas G. (1996). Creating Reading Instruction for All Children. Chapter 6, 192-236.
Huffman, Lois E. (1998). Spotlighting Specifics by Combining Focus Questions With K-W-L. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Issue 6, 470-471.
Katims, David S. (1997). Improving the Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students in Inclusive Classrooms. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Issue 2, 116-124.
Kitao, Kathleen S. (1990). Textual Schemata and English Language Learning. Cross Currents, Issue 3, 147-155.
Perkins, D.N. (1991). Educating for Insight. Educational Leadership. Issue 2, 4-9.
Armstrong, Thomas. (1994). Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom. Chapter 6, 72.

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References: School of Education October 2, 1998 Gunning (1996) identifies three main theories of reading comprehension. These theories are Schema Theory, Mental Models, and Proposition Theory. Schema Theory Gunning (1996) defines a schema as the organized knowledge that one already has about people, places, things, and events STRATEGIES Katims (1997) stated that learning strategies are techniques, or routines that enable students to learn to solve problems and complete tasks independently Preparational Gunning (1996) describes Preparational strategies as those that activate prior knowledge about a particular topic Organizational Gunning (1996) describes Organizational strategies as the process of selecting important details and building relationships from them Elaboration Gunning (1996) refers to elaboration as an additional processing of the text, by the reader, which may increase comprehension Monitoring Gunning (1996) defines monitoring as being aware of one’s own mental process when reading Huffman, Lois E. (1998). Spotlighting Specifics by Combining Focus Questions With K-W-L. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Issue 6, 470-471. Katims, David S. (1997). Improving the Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students in Inclusive Classrooms. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Issue 2, 116-124. Kitao, Kathleen S. (1990). Textual Schemata and English Language Learning. Cross Currents, Issue 3, 147-155. Perkins, D.N. (1991). Educating for Insight. Educational Leadership. Issue 2, 4-9. Armstrong, Thomas. (1994). Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom. Chapter 6, 72.