THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMPREHENSION OF VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL STATUS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LEARNING DISABLED STUDENTS
Abstract
Researchers have established that learning disabled students are at risk for social difficulties. The cause of this problem is presently receiving attention. This study was designed to investigate the relationship between comprehension of verbal language, intelligence, and social status in elementary school learning disabled children. Forty-nine learning disabled third through sixth grade students from a predominantly white, middle class suburban school system were subjects. Each was tested individually using indirect request, idiomatic expression, riddle, analogy, context clue, and semantic restriction tasks to establish language comprehension facility. Social status was measured through administration of open and forced choice sociograms to homeroom classes of subjects. Scores from previously administered WISC-R's were used. Means, standard deviations, and F's were calculated for all variables. The only sex differences found were on the idiomatic expression and analogy tasks. Median scores and score ranges on the two sociometric measures differed significantly. The scores were significantly related, however, when simple correlations were calculated. Separate multiple regression analyses were done with open and forced choice sociometric data as criteria for the total group, boys, and girls, and with WISC-R scores forced to remove effect. Results indicated that there were no significant predictor relationships among the variables and social status established by open selection. For social status established by forced choice, however, results indicated that the WISC-R score was a significant predictor for the total group. For boys, WISC-R, idiomatic expression, and context clue scores were significant predictors. That there were no significant relationships among variables for girls may be explained by the fact that there were only eighteen girls in the study. Differences seen between scores on open and forced choice sociograms indicated that the type of sociometric instrument used may influence research results. Results with forced choice sociogram scores indicated that intelligence and language comprehension, specifically language in context, did affect social status of learning disabled male subjects of this study. It was suggested that these results be verified with other learning disabled populations.
Subject Area
Special education
Recommended Citation
ANDERSON, JOYCE P, "THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMPREHENSION OF VERBAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL STATUS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LEARNING DISABLED STUDENTS" (1983). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI8326157.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI8326157
