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I don't understand what you mean by comprehension.
The Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
|May 1, 1978
Summary
Current clinical tools assess only literal language comprehension in children, missing crucial elements like inference and speaker intent. A comprehensive approach is needed for accurate language assessment.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Clinical Assessment
Background:
- Current clinical assessments of child language comprehension focus on vocabulary and syntax.
- These methods primarily evaluate the understanding of literal sentence meaning.
- A broader scope is needed to include pragmatic aspects of communication.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review current clinical instruments for assessing language comprehension in children.
- To identify limitations in existing measures regarding deeper comprehension.
- To highlight the need for a more integrated approach to language assessment.
Main Methods:
- Selective review of existing clinical language comprehension tests for children.
- Analysis of assessment components, focusing on literal meaning versus inferential and pragmatic understanding.
- Comparison with tests for reading skills and adult aphasia for complex comprehension items.
Main Results:
- Existing clinical tests predominantly measure receptive vocabulary and syntactic structure.
- Comprehension assessments are limited to the literal meaning of spoken language.
- No current clinical tests evaluate a child's ability to infer meaning or understand illocutionary acts.
Conclusions:
- Current clinical language comprehension tests are insufficient for a comprehensive evaluation.
- There is a significant gap in assessing inferential and pragmatic language skills in children.
- An integrated approach to language comprehension assessment is currently unavailable in clinical practice.