2018 National Conference Adelaide

Featured Presenters

Wednesday 30 May

9.00am - 10.30am

WKP – Keynote Presentation Cognitive predictors of language comprehension in school-age children: New findings and their clinical implications Approximately 70% of children identified with developmental language disorders (DLD) in kindergarten will present cognitive, linguistic, social and academic problems as teenagers, with comprehension deficits being particularly intractable. Because much of the written discourse encountered by adolescents contains complex sentence structures, language comprehension skills are critical to social, academic and economic success. Critically, language comprehension ability appears to be a significant predictor of educational attainment and occupational SES during adulthood, in particular when combined with teacher ratings of behaviour, family SES and reading ability. Together, these factors place adolescents with DLD at significant risk for poor outcomes. Dr Gillam will summarise a large scale study of 385 children between the ages of seven and twelve, 122 who had developmental language disorders and 254 who were typically developing. The children received an extensive battery of cognitive processing measures that assessed fluid intelligence, attention, short-term memory, complex working memory, lexical retrieval, and speed of processing functions. They also received a battery of measures that assessed lexical-semantic, morpho-syntactic, and narrative language abilities. Structural equation modelling was used to test moderators and mediators of language comprehension. Dr Gillam will describe the GEM (Gillam-Evans-Montgomery) model of cognition and comprehension and will talk about what it means for language assessment and language intervention. Specifically, he will discuss the implications of a new understanding of the factors that moderate and mediate language comprehension for conducting informative language assessments and for selecting interventions that are likely to yield the most functional outcomes for school-age children.

Dr Ron Gillam Ron Gillam, PhD holds the Raymond and Eloise Lillywhite Endowed Chair in Speech-Language Pathology at Utah State University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Neuroscience. His research, which has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education, primarily concerns information processing, language assessment, and language intervention with school-age children with language disorders. Dr Gillam has published three books, three norm-referenced tests, and more than 130 articles and book chapters. He has been an associate editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, the American Journal of Speech- Language Pathology, and Topics in Language Disorders. Dr Gillam has received numerous teaching and research awards including Honors of the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Association (ASHA), Distinguished Alumnus at Indiana University, ASHA Fellow, the Haydn Williams Fellow at Curtin University in Western Australia, the Dads Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, the Editor’s Award for the article of highest merit in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (twice) and the Robins Award for the outstanding researcher at Utah State University.

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