Processing deficits: a matter of semantics

This paper will reflect upon the research by psycholinguists, applied linguists and speech-language pathologists in children's semantic processing of the formal language of the academic classroom, and recent attempts to devise intervention procedures that will assist children in comprehending the often decontextualized language of instruction. In so doing, it is necessary to consider the child's developmental status, present cognitive and metacognitive strategies, speed of lexical access and retrieval, semantic schemes and scripts, as well as the episodic memory constraints of young children. Indeed, while it is important to analyze how children process instructional language, it is equally important to consider how instructional language, either spoken or written, may be modified to more clearly meet the processing capacities of language disordered children.This paper will reflect upon the research by psycholinguists, applied linguists and speech-language pathologists in children's semantic processing of the formal language of the academic classroom, and recent attempts to devise intervention procedures that will assist children in comprehending the often decontextualized language of instruction. In so doing, it is necessary to consider the child's developmental status, present cognitive and metacognitive strategies, speed of lexical access and retrieval, semantic schemes and scripts, as well as the episodic memory constraints of young children. Indeed, while it is important to analyze how children process instructional language, it is equally important to consider how instructional language, either spoken or written, may be modified to more clearly meet the processing capacities of language disordered children