Differential Processing Training Program: Linguistic Tasks

Ages: 6-12
Grades: 1-7

Target the processing skills that underpin steady, consistent language development. This systematic progression of tasks focuses on word relationships, prosody, and language organization.

These lessons individually and as a group, teach children to manipulate increasingly complex units of language. Each one-page activity has a clear, measurable goal and a performance grid for easy measurement, identification of error patterns, and quick documentation of progress.

The lessons are grouped into three skill areas:

Word Relationships

• Associations–recognize and explain associations; generate associated words
• Comparisons–identify and explain similarities and differences
• Synonyms–identify, generate, and compare synonyms
• Antonyms–recognize and generate antonyms
• Multiple-Meaning Words–identify, explain, and define multiple-meaning words
• Similes–identify similar characteristics, identify items by characteristics, complete and generate similes

Prosodic Interpretation

• Emotions–recognize and infer emotions and identify emotional intonation
• Sentence Intonation–recognize intonation, infer sentence meaning from intonation, use intonation appropriately
• Stress and Rhythm–discriminate syllable and word stress and rhythm, interpret changes in stress and rhythm

Language Organization

• Convergent Naming–identify objects from clues, discriminate and identify categories, identify commonalities among objects
• Divergent Naming–name category members by function, parts, and attributes; complete analogies
• Feature Description–describe objects by attributes, parts, and function; generate effective clues about object

155 pages 8.5 x 11 softcover ©2007