Scholarlycritique assignment

In addition, the purpose sought primarily to determine if the learning disability children with cleft had in reading was more closely connected to peripheral speech problems or to symbolic language problems by administering a series of test to them. Consequently, the authors included two hypotheses which were constructed to help in achieving the objectives of the study. The first hypothesis was that children with only phonetic word errors will have very few other cognitive disabilities and their errors may be related to peripheral speech problems only.

The second hypothesis was that the reading problems of the children who have either sight word errors or reading comprehension problems may be directly related to neuropsychological and or other language deficiencies. These hypotheses were testable and served to help clearly define the problem. Importantly, the author stated that the study was deemed necessary because previous studies revealed that high incidence of significant reading problems had been demonstrated in relatively high proportions among children with cleft.

This included auditory association, word fluency, picture association, and standardized reading inventory. No significant differences were found between the two groups on visual perception skills, on visual motor or graph motor skills or in word recognition level. Both groups were almost equally below the 100 mean that is measured by the Wide Range Achievement Test. The cleft palate only children subsequently made significant more non-phonetic errors. Based on the findings, the greater reading challenges exist with the cleft palate only group. These challenges appear to be indicative of language deficiencies in general.

Due to the pervasiveness of their learning disability in reading, the author concluded that this group should benefit from corrective measures that signaled meeting their educational needs on a larger scope. With the Cleft lip and palate group, the reading challenges appear to be associated with a peripheral speech deficiency that is phonetically related. In discussing the results, the authors exhibited little or no confidence in their findings in that they used the word probably too many times in their explanation of what was reflected in the results.