Verbal abilities in healthy elderly adults.

The Multilingual Aphasia Examination, a short battery of language measures, was administered to 61 healthy, community-dwelling adults (42 female, 19 male) 70 to 90 years old, and their performances were compared with the norms for younger participants. The intent was to investigate the decline of verbal abilities with advancing age and to consider the implications of such a decline for the interpretation of the performances of other elderly individuals. A significant age-related decline in performance was found on only one (Sentence Repetition) of the nine tests. Of note, Sentence Repetition is also the only test that makes specific demands on both short-term memory and serial auditory information processing. The relative stability of verbal performances from the early adult years to the ninth decade suggests that the occurrence of defective performances in older individuals is more likely to reflect the presence of "age-associated" disease rather than "normal" aging. Further, the findings suggest that normative standards derived from the performances of unselected, representative samples of elderly adults may not be adequate bases for clinical interpretation.

Communication and social growth: a developmental model of social behavior in deaf children.

A cognitive developmental model for the social interaction and behavior of deaf children is proposed. This model takes into account reports of high-frequency behavioral and social problems manifested by deaf children. Emphasis is placed on the role of language in the development of social perceptions and interactions. Problems of social interaction are attributed to the delayed language development of some deaf children. Implications for intervention strategies are discussed.

Thresholds of discomfort in young children.

Procedures for obtaining thresholds of discomfort from young children are almost nonexistent. This is likely due to the problems encountered in finding a task that they can easily perform. The purpose of this project was to design and test a procedure appropriate to the cognitive and language abilities of 4- to 5-yr-old hearing-impaired children. Data obtained from normally hearing subjects indicate that the procedure can be used with children whose mental ages are at or above 5 yr.

Validity of the Missouri Children's Picture Series as a predictor of childhood sleep disturbances.

In view of recent findings in a retrospective study by two of the authors, the present research was designed to systematically assess the validity of the Missouri Children's Picture Series sleep disturbances scale. Study I compared groups of restless sleepers and nocturnal enuretics with matched cohorts attending a summer residential program for children with communication-related disorders. Study II examined the relation of two MCPS scales to parent reports of corresponding problems, using a multitrait-multimethod matrix, individual correlations, and cluster analysis. Neither study provided convincing evidence for the validity of the sleep disturbance scale.