A 3-year longitudinal study of the language performance of children from poverty was designed to address the problem of separating children with a specific language impairment (SLI) from low-scoring normal children in the borderline area on the continuum of language performance where normal ends and abnormal begins. Two approaches to definition were compared: an experimental approach (using story-retelling, rote-memory ability, and invented-morpheme learning) and a traditional approach (using standardized-test discrepancy scores). Results indicated that 6 of 34 children tracked from kindergarten through second grade appeared to be SLI at the end of the study. The best kindergarten predictor for the outcome status of these 6 children was a combination of the score on the Oral Vocabulary subtest of the TOLD-2P and the score on a combination of the experimental tasks. The best single kindergarten predictor of the academic status of the 15 children in the study who received academic remediation was story-retelling. Children’s scores on the experimental and standardized tests of language performance and nonverbal intelligence were profiled over the 3 years of the study, and patterns of change in many instances reveal the lifting of the early influences of poverty.

This study evaluates children’s performance on selected spatial prepositions and determines the age levels these prepositions are acquired in both receptive and expressive language, as revealed in tasks involving both two- and three-dimensional objects. Subjects were 80 children (40 males and 40 females), ranging in age from three years to four years and eleven months. All were native English speakers with no speech, hearing, or neurological disorders, and with normal intelligence. Results indicated a significant difference in test scores according to age (older children perform better than younger), task (comprehension scores higher than production scores), referent (three-dimensional tasks showing higher scores than two-dimensional tasks), and preposition. Children’s use of selected spatial prepositions is dependent on the semantic complexity of the preposition. Prepositions whose meanings can be described in terms of simple topological notions are understood and used with greater facility than those involving dimensional or Euclidean spatial notions. When the prepositional variable interacts with age, dimension, task, age + dimension, age + task, dimension + task, and age + dimension + task, overall differential responses are likely to occur.

Evaluations of applicants to most university speech and hearing programs rely on quantitative measures such as undergraduate grade point averages (UGPA) and scores on the aptitude portions of the Graduate Record Examinations (GREs). However, the ability of these factors to predict success of students pursuing master’s degrees in speech-language pathology has not been verified. In an effort to select the students who are most likely to excel in our graduate program, an analysis of factors used to evaluate applications to our master’s program was undertaken. Information was extracted from records of students enrolled in the Indiana University MA program in speech-language pathology between 1992 and 1995. Students chosen for this analysis were considered to be among the top or bottom students in their class, as measured by final graduate GPA and scores on the PRAXIS examination. A discriminant analysis was performed using UGPA, scores on the verbal, quantitative, and analytical subtests of the GREs, undergraduate university, and undergraduate major as input variables. This analysis indicated that students’ achievement in a master’s program could be predicted with 93% accuracy on the basis of UGPA alone. By contrast, when GRE scores were used to calculate the discriminant function, classification accuracy reached only 63%. A cross-validation analysis classified a second group of randomly selected students with 80% accuracy. The results of the current investigation are compared to studies in other disciplines that indicate limited utility of GRE scores in the prediction of students’ success in master’s degree programs.

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The present study comprised an analysis and comparison of the language performance of educable mentally retarded and normal children at mental age levels six through 10 years. Both syntactic and functional performance variables were investigated. The results indicate language performance differences between the two groups with the primary discriminators being hesitation phenomena (false starts, filled pauses, and repeats) and clausal constructions (relative and subordinate clauses), resulting in a higher sentence elaboration level for normal children.