Ela : Everyday Life Activities - Photo Series

This photo series is designed for language training, teaching, testing and remediation of word-, sentence- and text/discourse-level abilities.

It should be of use for comprehensive evaluation and/or training of a person's ability to produce and understand verbs, sentences and texts, to learn a vocabulary of daily-life activities, to attend to or memorize linguistic and visual material, and to order sequential activities.

A family of four persons - boy, girl, woman, man - is depicted on the photo cards, which can be used interchangeably.

ELA covers activities from all areas of life, including sleeping, eating, getting washed, reading, communicating, going shopping, driving a car and swimming.

On each card, a single activity is depicted, which is performed by one or two persons, or a scene is shown in which the family is doing something such as eating breakfast or playing cards.

The selection of the activities is based on linguistic and psycholinguistic criteria (such as sentence type, structure and complexity).

Systematic use of ELA is facilitated by a practical manual, consisting of suggestions for use and indexes which are designed for specific purposes. These indexes include a listing of the verbs, i.e. activities, according to themes or semantic categories, and an alphabetical listing of the verbs with information on several linguistic features: information about the verbs and sentence structure, a list of the depicted objects, and a French and Italian translation of the verbs.

A multiple-choice sentence comprehension task and a sentence production task are also given in the manual.

ELA can be used for the assessment, remediation and/or training of: adults with a language or speech impairment sequel to brain damage; children with a delay in language development or a language impairment due to (minimal) brain damage; adults or children with other neuropsychological impairments as a sequel to brain damage; geriatric persons suffering from dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) or from other syndromes giving rise to dementia; autistic children; hearing-impaired children and adults; and persons learning a second or a foreign language.

It can also be used for (psycho-)linguistic evaluation of syntactic abilities of healthy persons and of children in the process of acquiring their first language.

A German language version is available.