Abstract
Summary
This paper presents data concerned with the characteristics and progress of eleven children with severe receptive language difficulties attending a residential special school. Observations and standardised test results were obtained relating to hearing and listening behaviour, social adjustment, motor co-ordination, visual-spatial and sequencing skills, non-verbal intelligence and language behaviour. In general the reliability of the measurements employed appeared to be reasonably satisfactory.
All the children were impaired in listening skills and had difficulties in language acquisition, but in other respects they showed a wide range of individual problems. Improvement was measured by means of test-retest analyses. Those children who gained higher initial ratings in listening behaviour, language ability and social adjustment made more progress in language development. However in spite of very favourable teaching conditions the progress made by this sample of children in spoken language acquisition during the period of the study was generally very small.