| Abstract: |
An experiment with two groups of 6-year-old language-impaired children contrasted the effects of two treatment programs on generalization to untrained words in a picture naming task. A more traditional treatment focused on semantic associations and organization of the semantic store, and a newer treatment focused on the phonological and perceptual components of the retrieval process and involved practice in segmenting words and manipulating word segments as well as training in forming and holding visual and auditory images. Subjects receiving the phonological and perceptual treatment improved significantly in naming untrained pictures, but the semantic treatment group made no significant improvement. The design of the experiment and the results are related to Wolfs multistage model of the retrieval process. Because the results involved generalization to untrained words, they suggest that the perceptual and phonological processes described in Wolfs model may have been improved by the imagery and segmentation treatment. |
