Thinking aloud: effects on text comprehension by children with specific language impairment and their peers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many lines of evidence now suggest that inferencing plays a substantial role in text comprehension. However, inferencing appears to be difficult for children with language impairments, many of whom are also struggling readers. AIMS: To assess the effects of a 'think-aloud' procedure on inference generation and narrative text comprehension by children with expressive-receptive specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched peers with typical language development (TLD). METHODS & PROCEDURES: An SLI group (n = 12; mean age = 10;5) and an age-matched TLD group (n = 12) participated in the study. Narrative passages were read silently by participants and simultaneously read aloud by the examiner in two conditions: (1) uninterrupted reading and (2) a think-aloud, in which children verbalized their understanding as the text was read. Following the passages in both conditions, children responded to comprehension questions requiring either literal or inferential information (specifically, 'informational' and 'causal' inferences). The children's comprehension scores were analysed by group, condition and question type. The statements children generated during the think-aloud were also compared by group and examined in relation to children's comprehension scores. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The SLI group scored lower than the TLD group on all questions (literal, informational and causal), in both conditions. For both groups, however, comprehension scores on all three types of questions increased when the think-aloud procedure was implemented. During the think-aloud, the SLI group generated a comparable number of literal statements compared with the TLD group, but fewer informational and causal statements. The number of causal statements children made correlated with their scores on the inferential comprehension questions. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Children with expressive-receptive SLI showed poorer comprehension of narrative texts than children with TLD, as expected. However, both groups' comprehension improved when participating in the think-aloud condition. While further investigation is warranted, the think-aloud procedure shows promise as a strategy to enhance narrative text comprehension in school-age children with, and without, language impairments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".