BACKGROUND Several studies suggest the association of specific language impairment (SLI) to deficits in auditory processing. It has been evidenced that children with SLI present deficit in brief stimuli discrimination. Such deficit would lead to difficulties in developing phonological abilities necessary to map phonemes and to effectively and automatically code and decode words and sentences. H...

Three patients with otherwise typical Wernicke's aphasia showed consistent superiority of visual over auditory comprehension. The precedents for and anatomical basis of a selective auditory deficit in Wernicke's aphasia are discussed, including the relationship to pure word deafness. One implication of spared visual language function may be the use of gesture in language therapy for such patients.

The present case report introduces a patient with fluent aphasia, anterograde amnesia and anosmia due to herpes simplex encephalitis after her first delivery. The left medial temporal lobe was one of the main areas involved. On aphasia testing she showed severe anomia on both confrontation and free recall, agraphia, alexia, repetition disorder and some auditory comprehension impairments. Therap...

MacDonald’s (2013) productiondistribution-comprehension (PDC) account provides a valuable unification of three aspects of language use. It identifies some of the principles involved in production and shows how they affect both distributions of linguistic forms and the process of comprehension. Our commentary presents a complementary perspective on the relationship between production and compreh...

Many studies have shown that a supportive context facilitates language comprehension. A currently influential view is that language production may support prediction in language comprehension. Experimental evidence for this, however, is relatively sparse. Here we explored whether encouraging prediction in a language production task encourages the use of predictive contexts in an interleaved com...

The role played by comprehension in oral reading was investigated in three patients with progressive fluent aphasia. For patients J.L. and G.C., there was evidence of a deficit in semantic memory affecting both word production and comprehension. F.M., although equally anomic, had significantly better single-word comprehension than either J.L. or G.C. It was predicted that, for J.L. and G.C., su...

The article describes how the dictogloss method and cooperative learning can be combined to promote the development of listening and speaking skills of second language learners. The paper begins with an outline of the dictogloss procedure and the theoretical background behind it. The procedures for conducting a dictogloss-based listening class are then described in great detail. Finally, the po...

This article presents the findings of the final phase of a 5-year longitudinal study with 168 middle- and upper middle-class children in which the complex relations among early home literacy experiences, subsequent receptive language and emergent literacy skills, and reading achievement were examined. Results showed that children's exposure to books was related to the development of vocabulary ...

Based on the assumption that good decoding skills constitute a bootstrapping mechanism for reading comprehension, the present study investigated the relative contribution of the former skill to the latter compared to that of three other predictors of reading comprehension (listening comprehension, vocabulary and phonemic awareness) in 392 French-speaking first graders from low SES families. Thi...

We examined the Simple View of reading from a behavioral genetic perspective. Two aspects of word decoding (phonological decoding and word recognition), two aspects of oral language skill (listening comprehension and vocabulary), and reading comprehension were assessed in a twin sample at age 9. Using latent factor models, we found that overlap among phonological decoding, word recognition, lis...