... It is rigor and discipline that define its value. The subjectivity of validity can be appreci... more ... It is rigor and discipline that define its value. The subjectivity of validity can be appreciated by the following comment from Messick (1980): "It is important to note that validity is itself inferred, not measured" (p. 1014). Regarding ...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1982
Two studies were conducted to determine the effect locus of action had on children's conjunct... more Two studies were conducted to determine the effect locus of action had on children's conjunction use and clause ordering. Subjects in the first study were 45 normal children between the ages 3:0 and 5:2. The results of the first study showed that the two contexts in which children performed actions were more facilitating to language performance than the context in which children observed the experimenter perform actions. However, the verbal model which accompanied the two child-initiated action contexts might have contributed to these differences. A second experiment was therefore conducted in which the verbal model was eliminated. No differences in conjunction use or clause ordering were founnd among contexts in the second study. Thus, by itself, locus of action had little influenee on language performance. However, when coupled with the verbal model, which seemed to function as a focusing device, performance was enhanced. It was concluded that child-initiated action contexts w...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1981
This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverb... more This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverbal intelligence suffer from representational and symbolization deficits (Morehead & Ingram, 1973). The study also examined the developing concepts of class, number, and order in these children to evaluate the claim that their thinking and reasoning in the nonlinguistic domain were within normal limits. Subjects were language-impaired children and two groups of normally developing children, one matched for MA and the other for MLU to the language-impaired group. Each group consisted of ten children. Each child was administered six nonstandardized cognitive tasks from the Piagetian literature. These tasks were designed to assess developing nonlinguistic symbolic abilities and conceptual knowledge of class, number, and order relations. The language-impaired children consistently performed better than MLU-matched controls but more poorly than MA-matched peers. However, only one task—Haptic R...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1995
The present study examined Cromer’s (1983) claim that children with language impairments have a h... more The present study examined Cromer’s (1983) claim that children with language impairments have a hierarchical planning deficit that affects language as well as performance on complex construction tasks. Subjects were 30 boys (ages 5–7 years), 15 with specific language impairments (SLI) and 15 with normally developing language. Children were asked to build four hierarchical structures: a block construction, a puzzle construction, a simple straw construction, and a complex straw construction. Children who failed to complete the complex straw construction were taught how to construct the model using a sequential strategy. The two groups tended to perform comparably on the block and complex straw construction, the easiest and hardest of the four constructions. The two groups performed least comparably on the puzzle, simple straw construction, and the training task. On the basis of these findings and recent work by Greenfield (1991), we concluded that it is time to reject the notion that ...
In this study, the trial-by-trial acquisition procedures developed by Gholson, Eymard, Morgan, an... more In this study, the trial-by-trial acquisition procedures developed by Gholson, Eymard, Morgan, and Kamhi (1987) were used to examine analogical reasoning processes in school-age language-impaired (LI) children and normal age peers. Subjects were 16 LI and 16 normally developing children between the ages 6:4 and 8:9 years. Half of the subjects heard only verbal presentations of the problems, whereas the other half heard the verbal presentations while simultaneously viewing physical demonstrations of the problems. The LI children who heard only verbal presentations of the problems took significantly longer to acquire the problem solutions than the other LI children and the normal children in both conditions. There were no differences in children's performance on the transfer task. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1995
This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moder... more This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moderate hearing losses. We questioned whether degree of hearing loss or measures of language and phonological processing abilities were more likely to be related to novel word-learning ability. Subjects were 20 children with hearing impairment (M = 9:0) and 20 children with normal hearing (M = 6:5) matched for receptive vocabulary knowledge. Children were administered measures of language and phonological processing. The novel word-learning task consisted of an acquisition and retention phase in which children received a series of trials to learn to produce four novel words. Half of the children with hearing impairment performed comparably to the children with normal hearing on all of the measures obtained, whereas the other 10 children with hearing impairment performed more poorly than the higher functioning children with hearing impairment and all of the children with normal hearing on mos...
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1984
This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifica... more This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifications of six normally developing children. Subjects produced selected words containing initial voiced and voiceless stops and /s/+ stop clusters at monthly intervals. Speech samples were transcribed phonetically, and voice onset times (VOT) of the stop consonants were measured. The results revealed that subjects reduced clusters most frequently to stop consonants with short-lag VOTs. However, two children also occasionally employed prevoicing, and one subject used long-lag VOTs in cluster-reduced stops. Because cluster-reduced stops and voiced singleton stops were generally produced with similar VOTs, it was concluded that subjects represented clustered stops most frequently as phonemically voiced.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1984
This study examined the effects of variations in language complexity on young children's phon... more This study examined the effects of variations in language complexity on young children's phonological accuracy and consistency of target words. A more general intent was to understand better the way in which developmental level and children's tolerance of speech variability influenced the management of processing demands. Seven children aged 22–34 months were seen six times over a 4-month period. During these sessions, children were presented with an elicited imitation task consisting of 18 stimulus words, each of which occurred in eight sentences of varying language complexity. Younger children in Language Stage III were found to be more influenced by changes in language complexity than older children in Language Stages IV and V. Within-stage differences were also found. Moreover, in contrast to previous research, children showed as many improvements in phonological accuracy with increases in language complexity as they did decreases in phonological accuracy. It was suggest...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1990
This research note presents the results of a content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Sca... more This research note presents the results of a content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI). We also compared the intratest performance of a selected sample of language-impaired (LI) and MA-matched normal language children on these two tests. These analyses are an extension of Johnston’s (1982) report on the Leiter. The content analysis revealed differences in the nature of perceptual and conceptual items on the Columbia and the TONI. Consistent with Johnston’s findings, the intratest comparisons revealed no significant group differences. LI and normal-language children performed significantly better on the perceptual-type items than the conceptual-type items. The predominance of perceptual items was particularly evident in the TONI.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1991
This study explored the effects of contextual support, discourse genre, and the listener’s knowle... more This study explored the effects of contextual support, discourse genre, and the listener’s knowledge of information on syntactic and phonologic production and fluency. Subjects were language-learning-disabled, reading-disabled, and normal primary school children. Clause structure complexity, fluency, and grammatical and phonemic accuracy tended to be highest when children were discussing absent referents, providing explanations and stories, and giving unshared information. These effects were generally the same across all groups, although some effects were significant for only the language-learning-disabled children. Several explanations for these findings are considered.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1992
Factors influencing the occurrence of trade-off effects among linguistic components were examined... more Factors influencing the occurrence of trade-off effects among linguistic components were examined. Several linguistic measures were used to represent syntactic and phonological production in order to determine whether interrelationship patterns would vary across measures. Linguistic interactions present in imitated speech were compared to those from spontaneous speech. Group effects were explored by comparing data from children with language-learning disabilities, children with reading disabilities, and normally developing children. Results indicated trade-offs between some linguistic measures and positive relationships among others. More trade-offs were present in imitated speech than in spontaneous utterances. In general, interrelationship patterns were similar across groups. Interpretation of these results in reference to current models of sentence production is offered.
The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness o... more The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness of words, syllables, and sounds. Subjects were 15 language-disordered children matched for mental age to 15 normally developing children and for language age to another 15 normally developing children. In the first task, children were asked to divide sentences, bisyllabic words, and monosyllabic words into smaller units. In the second task, children were asked several questions designed to assess their word awareness. The language-disordered children performed significantly poorer than both groups of normally developing children in dividing sentences and words. The language-disordered children also did not show the same level of responses to the word-awareness questions as the normally developing children. These findings indicate that language-disordered children's metalinguistic deficit is not limited to difficulty making grammatical judgments. Importantly, these disordered children&...
The hypothesis-testing abilities of 15 language-impaired and 15 normally developing children matc... more The hypothesis-testing abilities of 15 language-impaired and 15 normally developing children matched for mental age were investigated using discrimination-learning tasks. The subjects in both groups were presented with two sets of discrimination-learning problems. One set of problems featured explicit input concerning the correct response choice. The other set of problems featured nonexplicit input. The results revealed both differences in the performance of the MA-matched and language-impaired children and differences in performance on the two types of problems. The children in both groups solved more of the explicit input problems than the nonexplicit input problems. In addition, the MA-matched children performed significantly better than the language-impaired children, particularly on the nonexplicit problems. The findings suggested that the language-impaired children exhibited deficits in solving discrimination-learning problems. The deficits exhibited by the language-impaired c...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1982
The purpose of this study was to provide a more accurate description of the language pertbrmance ... more The purpose of this study was to provide a more accurate description of the language pertbrmance of retarded children and, by doing so, to understand better how the general mental handicap affects language learning. Subjects were a group of 10 retarded children matched for MA to a group of 10 normal children and 10 language-impaired children. Various syntactic and semantic analyses were performed. The results indicated that the retarded group's language abilities were essentially comparable to those of the normal group, though differences between these groups were found. Notably, the retarded children did not demonstrate the same linguistic deficiencies as the language-impaired children. It was suggested that the MA-inconsistent language behaviors exhibited by the retarded children were quantitative in nature rather than qualitative and as such seemed to reflect deficits in adaptive (i.e., social) and motivational behaviors rather than deficits in linguistic or cognitive abilities.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2011
Purpose In this article, I question how practitioners can balance the certainty and confidence th... more Purpose In this article, I question how practitioners can balance the certainty and confidence that they can help their patients with the uncertainty that makes them continually question their beliefs and assumptions. Method I compare the mechanisms of science and models of clinical practice that may help practitioners achieve the right balance between total acceptance of the status quo and an open willingness to explore and accept new ideas. Conclusion Clinical practice, unlike science, has no independent self-correction mechanism that leads to consensus about best clinical practices. Evidence-based models provide principles and guidelines for clinical practice, but ultimately, clinical decisions may be influenced most by a practitioner’s epistemology (belief systems) and propensity for rational thinking.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2009
Purpose This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the per... more Purpose This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the persistently high levels of reading failure that occurs in our schools and provides a brief summary of the 5 response articles. Method The arguments that support the narrow view of reading are presented and the respondents are introduced. Conclusion Although the contributors to this clinical forum may have different views, we all are working toward a common goal: improving the literacy levels of children in our schools.
... It is rigor and discipline that define its value. The subjectivity of validity can be appreci... more ... It is rigor and discipline that define its value. The subjectivity of validity can be appreciated by the following comment from Messick (1980): "It is important to note that validity is itself inferred, not measured" (p. 1014). Regarding ...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1982
Two studies were conducted to determine the effect locus of action had on children's conjunct... more Two studies were conducted to determine the effect locus of action had on children's conjunction use and clause ordering. Subjects in the first study were 45 normal children between the ages 3:0 and 5:2. The results of the first study showed that the two contexts in which children performed actions were more facilitating to language performance than the context in which children observed the experimenter perform actions. However, the verbal model which accompanied the two child-initiated action contexts might have contributed to these differences. A second experiment was therefore conducted in which the verbal model was eliminated. No differences in conjunction use or clause ordering were founnd among contexts in the second study. Thus, by itself, locus of action had little influenee on language performance. However, when coupled with the verbal model, which seemed to function as a focusing device, performance was enhanced. It was concluded that child-initiated action contexts w...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1981
This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverb... more This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverbal intelligence suffer from representational and symbolization deficits (Morehead & Ingram, 1973). The study also examined the developing concepts of class, number, and order in these children to evaluate the claim that their thinking and reasoning in the nonlinguistic domain were within normal limits. Subjects were language-impaired children and two groups of normally developing children, one matched for MA and the other for MLU to the language-impaired group. Each group consisted of ten children. Each child was administered six nonstandardized cognitive tasks from the Piagetian literature. These tasks were designed to assess developing nonlinguistic symbolic abilities and conceptual knowledge of class, number, and order relations. The language-impaired children consistently performed better than MLU-matched controls but more poorly than MA-matched peers. However, only one task—Haptic R...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1995
The present study examined Cromer’s (1983) claim that children with language impairments have a h... more The present study examined Cromer’s (1983) claim that children with language impairments have a hierarchical planning deficit that affects language as well as performance on complex construction tasks. Subjects were 30 boys (ages 5–7 years), 15 with specific language impairments (SLI) and 15 with normally developing language. Children were asked to build four hierarchical structures: a block construction, a puzzle construction, a simple straw construction, and a complex straw construction. Children who failed to complete the complex straw construction were taught how to construct the model using a sequential strategy. The two groups tended to perform comparably on the block and complex straw construction, the easiest and hardest of the four constructions. The two groups performed least comparably on the puzzle, simple straw construction, and the training task. On the basis of these findings and recent work by Greenfield (1991), we concluded that it is time to reject the notion that ...
In this study, the trial-by-trial acquisition procedures developed by Gholson, Eymard, Morgan, an... more In this study, the trial-by-trial acquisition procedures developed by Gholson, Eymard, Morgan, and Kamhi (1987) were used to examine analogical reasoning processes in school-age language-impaired (LI) children and normal age peers. Subjects were 16 LI and 16 normally developing children between the ages 6:4 and 8:9 years. Half of the subjects heard only verbal presentations of the problems, whereas the other half heard the verbal presentations while simultaneously viewing physical demonstrations of the problems. The LI children who heard only verbal presentations of the problems took significantly longer to acquire the problem solutions than the other LI children and the normal children in both conditions. There were no differences in children's performance on the transfer task. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1995
This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moder... more This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moderate hearing losses. We questioned whether degree of hearing loss or measures of language and phonological processing abilities were more likely to be related to novel word-learning ability. Subjects were 20 children with hearing impairment (M = 9:0) and 20 children with normal hearing (M = 6:5) matched for receptive vocabulary knowledge. Children were administered measures of language and phonological processing. The novel word-learning task consisted of an acquisition and retention phase in which children received a series of trials to learn to produce four novel words. Half of the children with hearing impairment performed comparably to the children with normal hearing on all of the measures obtained, whereas the other 10 children with hearing impairment performed more poorly than the higher functioning children with hearing impairment and all of the children with normal hearing on mos...
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1984
This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifica... more This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifications of six normally developing children. Subjects produced selected words containing initial voiced and voiceless stops and /s/+ stop clusters at monthly intervals. Speech samples were transcribed phonetically, and voice onset times (VOT) of the stop consonants were measured. The results revealed that subjects reduced clusters most frequently to stop consonants with short-lag VOTs. However, two children also occasionally employed prevoicing, and one subject used long-lag VOTs in cluster-reduced stops. Because cluster-reduced stops and voiced singleton stops were generally produced with similar VOTs, it was concluded that subjects represented clustered stops most frequently as phonemically voiced.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1984
This study examined the effects of variations in language complexity on young children's phon... more This study examined the effects of variations in language complexity on young children's phonological accuracy and consistency of target words. A more general intent was to understand better the way in which developmental level and children's tolerance of speech variability influenced the management of processing demands. Seven children aged 22–34 months were seen six times over a 4-month period. During these sessions, children were presented with an elicited imitation task consisting of 18 stimulus words, each of which occurred in eight sentences of varying language complexity. Younger children in Language Stage III were found to be more influenced by changes in language complexity than older children in Language Stages IV and V. Within-stage differences were also found. Moreover, in contrast to previous research, children showed as many improvements in phonological accuracy with increases in language complexity as they did decreases in phonological accuracy. It was suggest...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1990
This research note presents the results of a content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Sca... more This research note presents the results of a content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI). We also compared the intratest performance of a selected sample of language-impaired (LI) and MA-matched normal language children on these two tests. These analyses are an extension of Johnston’s (1982) report on the Leiter. The content analysis revealed differences in the nature of perceptual and conceptual items on the Columbia and the TONI. Consistent with Johnston’s findings, the intratest comparisons revealed no significant group differences. LI and normal-language children performed significantly better on the perceptual-type items than the conceptual-type items. The predominance of perceptual items was particularly evident in the TONI.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1991
This study explored the effects of contextual support, discourse genre, and the listener’s knowle... more This study explored the effects of contextual support, discourse genre, and the listener’s knowledge of information on syntactic and phonologic production and fluency. Subjects were language-learning-disabled, reading-disabled, and normal primary school children. Clause structure complexity, fluency, and grammatical and phonemic accuracy tended to be highest when children were discussing absent referents, providing explanations and stories, and giving unshared information. These effects were generally the same across all groups, although some effects were significant for only the language-learning-disabled children. Several explanations for these findings are considered.
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1992
Factors influencing the occurrence of trade-off effects among linguistic components were examined... more Factors influencing the occurrence of trade-off effects among linguistic components were examined. Several linguistic measures were used to represent syntactic and phonological production in order to determine whether interrelationship patterns would vary across measures. Linguistic interactions present in imitated speech were compared to those from spontaneous speech. Group effects were explored by comparing data from children with language-learning disabilities, children with reading disabilities, and normally developing children. Results indicated trade-offs between some linguistic measures and positive relationships among others. More trade-offs were present in imitated speech than in spontaneous utterances. In general, interrelationship patterns were similar across groups. Interpretation of these results in reference to current models of sentence production is offered.
The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness o... more The present investigation evaluated language-disordered children's metalinguistic awareness of words, syllables, and sounds. Subjects were 15 language-disordered children matched for mental age to 15 normally developing children and for language age to another 15 normally developing children. In the first task, children were asked to divide sentences, bisyllabic words, and monosyllabic words into smaller units. In the second task, children were asked several questions designed to assess their word awareness. The language-disordered children performed significantly poorer than both groups of normally developing children in dividing sentences and words. The language-disordered children also did not show the same level of responses to the word-awareness questions as the normally developing children. These findings indicate that language-disordered children's metalinguistic deficit is not limited to difficulty making grammatical judgments. Importantly, these disordered children&...
The hypothesis-testing abilities of 15 language-impaired and 15 normally developing children matc... more The hypothesis-testing abilities of 15 language-impaired and 15 normally developing children matched for mental age were investigated using discrimination-learning tasks. The subjects in both groups were presented with two sets of discrimination-learning problems. One set of problems featured explicit input concerning the correct response choice. The other set of problems featured nonexplicit input. The results revealed both differences in the performance of the MA-matched and language-impaired children and differences in performance on the two types of problems. The children in both groups solved more of the explicit input problems than the nonexplicit input problems. In addition, the MA-matched children performed significantly better than the language-impaired children, particularly on the nonexplicit problems. The findings suggested that the language-impaired children exhibited deficits in solving discrimination-learning problems. The deficits exhibited by the language-impaired c...
Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 1982
The purpose of this study was to provide a more accurate description of the language pertbrmance ... more The purpose of this study was to provide a more accurate description of the language pertbrmance of retarded children and, by doing so, to understand better how the general mental handicap affects language learning. Subjects were a group of 10 retarded children matched for MA to a group of 10 normal children and 10 language-impaired children. Various syntactic and semantic analyses were performed. The results indicated that the retarded group's language abilities were essentially comparable to those of the normal group, though differences between these groups were found. Notably, the retarded children did not demonstrate the same linguistic deficiencies as the language-impaired children. It was suggested that the MA-inconsistent language behaviors exhibited by the retarded children were quantitative in nature rather than qualitative and as such seemed to reflect deficits in adaptive (i.e., social) and motivational behaviors rather than deficits in linguistic or cognitive abilities.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2011
Purpose In this article, I question how practitioners can balance the certainty and confidence th... more Purpose In this article, I question how practitioners can balance the certainty and confidence that they can help their patients with the uncertainty that makes them continually question their beliefs and assumptions. Method I compare the mechanisms of science and models of clinical practice that may help practitioners achieve the right balance between total acceptance of the status quo and an open willingness to explore and accept new ideas. Conclusion Clinical practice, unlike science, has no independent self-correction mechanism that leads to consensus about best clinical practices. Evidence-based models provide principles and guidelines for clinical practice, but ultimately, clinical decisions may be influenced most by a practitioner’s epistemology (belief systems) and propensity for rational thinking.
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2009
Purpose This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the per... more Purpose This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the persistently high levels of reading failure that occurs in our schools and provides a brief summary of the 5 response articles. Method The arguments that support the narrow view of reading are presented and the respondents are introduced. Conclusion Although the contributors to this clinical forum may have different views, we all are working toward a common goal: improving the literacy levels of children in our schools.
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Papers by A. Kamhi