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A social system and ecological, as well as individual, perspective is applied to the development of a psychosocial community-oriented data system for children's mental health services. A rationale for the evaluation procedure and the necessary criteria met by the data system are presented. The problem appraisal focuses on the assessment of multiple determinants of the child's behavior incorporating individual, family, organizational and ecological factors. The data system provides retrievable information on selected intake, intervention and outcome parameters. Applications of the data system to the intake assessment process, for administrative monitoring and review purposes, and as a training and research instrument are discussed. (Author)

In a verbal memory study of language development, third- through sixth-grade children read and orally recalled short, expository passages which were presented in three syntactic paraphrase forms: (1) complex sentences with preverbal elaboration such as complex subject nominalizations and relative clauses, (2) complex sentences with postverbal elaboration, and (3) simple sentences. Syntactic analysis of the children's best recall samples (those showing high semantic recall) revealed that third through fifth graders tended to paraphrase the target information in simple sentences, regardless of the complexity of the material they had read. Sixth graders, however, maintained the original syntax more often than younger subjects, suggesting a better recall memory for syntactically complex features of discourse. The results corroborate previous findings showing that children's speech in the upper elementary grades shifts towards greater structural complexity. As suggested by Ingram (1975), such a shift may reflect important developmental changes in the linguistic strategies children use during this age range for producing complex sentences in connected discourse. (Author)

Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses two issues: (1) What principles of sentence organization should guide the physical segmentation of text as an aid for poor readers? and (2) What intrasentence units, if made explicit, would best facilitate children's induction of effective reading comprehension strategies? Throughout this inquiry, two types of sentence organization are discussed--syntactic organization, and information processing organization. The first part of the paper examines the nature of speech units by looking at sentence perception, and describes some assumptions of comprehension processes that serve as a conceptual framework for later discussion of several psycholinguistic approaches to the study of immediate processing units in speech perception. The second part considers studies of speech production and describes the prosodic features of spoken sentences and their complex relationship to syntactic organization and information "packaging." (HOD)

The psychological process of segmenting sentences into meaningful units or "chunks" is believed to be an important aspect of text comprehension processes. The most characteristic type of parsing task elicits perceptions of text structure indirectly by asking individuals to make judgments about pause placement in sentences. In four studies of sentence parsing, individuals were asked to locate boundaries between groups of words on the basis of one of the following cues: words that form meaningful groups, locations where one would pause when reading out loud, and locations where it would be acceptable to pause. A major conclusion from these studies was that any one of these instructions was likely to be confusing to children. Children understood the parsing task best when the instructions directed their attention to both the sound and the meaning of instrasentence units. Most studies of pausing phenomena as measures of structural units are based on the idea that pausing is at least acceptable at constituent boundaries. Although the units defined by children's pausal judgments seem to agree fairly well with adult intuitions of parsing structure, it is not clear that such units give a description of the optional "chunks" for processing by poor readers. Critical factors in the selection of an optimal unit appear to be whether information is new or old and the number of propositions expressed (which is correlated with the number of words). (HOD)

Two views of the sources of poor reading comprehension are currently distinguishable in the research literature: a decoding sufficiency view and a comprehension skills view. The decoding sufficiency view argues that decoding is the only skill that must be acquired for general language comprehension. The broader, comprehension skills hypothesis argues that a deficiency in any of several basic component skills could thwart reading comprehension mastery. R. M. Golinkoff's major review of studies comparing good and poor comprehenders posited three components of comprehension: decoding, lexical access, and text organization. Research on decoding has yielded some hypotheses relating decoding speed to comprehension, but problems of study design cast some doubt on these conclusions. Research on lexical access ability indicates that poor comprehenders do not typically lack this ability; however, if cognitive overload during reading is more frequent among poor comprehenders, it is likely that lexical access functioning will deteriorate. Most clearly, text organization research has consistently shown that poor comprehenders are word-by-word readers while good comprehenders employ higher level strategies. (JL)

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story represented one of four formats: (1) whole sentence, (2) single words, (3) phrasal units, and (4) fragmented groups. Each subject read the first story in the set aloud without answering comprehension questions, then read the remaining three stories silently, answering four questions after each. The findings showed that compared to the other text formats, the phrasal text led to slight improvements in reading comprehension. This format also improved oral reading performance, at least for moderately poor readers. (Materials used in the study are appended.) (FL)

A review of research concerning the nature of text organization skills that contribute to reading comprehension ability reveals two distinct categories of studies: (1) those in which texts have been manipulated so as to facilitate spontaneous syntactic-semantic organization by the reader, and (2) those in which readers have received training or instructions to process unaltered texts in a manner presumed conducive to improved comprehension. Studies in both categories suggest that the degree of organization imparted to a text during input processing is an important variable in reading comprehension. (Author/FL)

One hundred twenty-three fifth grade students participated in a study that investigated the role of prosodic cues in children's comprehension of discourse. The subjects, both good and poor readers, read, listened to, or read and listened to a story in one of four modes of visual and auditory presentation: (1) no audio, (2) normally intoned, (3) highly intoned, and (4) no print. In the first, second, and third conditions, the subjects completed both a comprehension message measure and a parsing activity in which they indicated points in the story where pauses were acceptable. Children in the fourth condition participated only in the comprehension activity. Results showed that the subjects were able to understand the parsing task and could identify intrasentence units in written passages. This was true even for those who did not have any auditory support during the task. The results of the parsing task showed that both good and poor readers readily perceived suprasegmental features in speech and used these cues effectively in identifying sentence structure. The findings support the theory that the poor representation of prosodic features in written text adds to the difficulty some children experience in learning to read. (Copies of the stimulus materials are appended.) (FL)

For the purpose of investigating instructional techniques that facilitate children's acquisition of reading comprehension skills in the middle and upper elementary grades, a 2-year inquiry into classroom instruction in reading comprehension was begun at the beginning of 1980. The initial focus of the study was on methods of assessment. Analytic inquiry focused on strategy differences between good and poor readers and remediation techniques for teaching comprehension skills beyond the word level. Following the analytic inquiry, a series of three empirical studies investigated an important but not widely studied aspect of reading skills development--children's perception of meaningful, intrasentence units in printed discourse. These studies found that (1) phrasally segmented text improved children's oral reading in regard to appropriate intonation, stress, and pauses; (2) both good and poor readers were able to use prosodic features in order to identify functional intrasentence units in speech, but poor readers had difficulty compensating for the lack of these organizing cues in printed text; and (3) oral modeling of text helped moderately poor readers to read out loud in a fluent manner, suggesting an improved understanding of text. These results suggest that auditory language skills should also be used as the basis for teaching children to analyze the phonological and structural organization of text on the larger level of phrases and sentences. (HOD)

This system for describing teaching events is intended to facilitate the analysis of classroom observations for purposes of comparing, documenting, or evaluating different instructional techniques. The typology is designed to describe a wide range of settings and teaching styles. The descriptors are organized into two groups that simultaneously depict two levels of events. Higher order events, such as tasks and lessons, are characterized in terms of the language content targeted for instruction, the language skill involved, and several features of language tasks. These tasks include an analysis of question types, response modes, and the role of cues. Communication events, such as turn-taking, depict the communication of an integral segment of information in classroom exchanges. The typology describes these events by their source, medium, purpose, and by a special group of descriptors for communication strategies and affective aspects of classroom interactions. The system will be useful to teacher educators, evaluators, and researchers interested in observing and analyzing language instruction. (Author/RW)