ELA: Everyday Life Activities

ELA is a photo series designed for language training, teaching, testing and remediation of word-, sentence-, and text/discourse-level abilities. ELA is of invaluable use for comprehensive evaluation and/or training of a person's ability to produce/understand verbs, sentences and texts, to learn a vocabulary of activities of daily life, to attend to or memorize linguistic and visual material and to order sequential activities.
ELA consists of three sets of 1000 colour photo cards, 10.5 x 15.5 cm in size. A family of four persons is depicted on the photo cards: boy, girl, woman and man. The photo cards can be used interchangeably, because the persons wear the same clothing for the series. ELA covers activities from all areas of life, e.g. sleeping, eating, getting washed, reading, communicating, going shopping, driving a car, swimming etc. 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 e.g. eating breakfast, playing cards etc. The selection of the activities is based on linguistic and psycholinguistic criteria (sentence type, structure, complexity etc).
ELA is a versatile instrument for the assessment, remediation and/or training of:
adults with a language or speech impairment sequel to brain damage (aphasia, i.e. dysphasia, alexia, agraphia, dysarthria, apraxia of speech);
children with a delay in language development of a language impairment due to (minimal) brain damage;
adults or children with other neuropsychological impairments as a sequel to brain damage (memory disorders, attentional deficits, apraxia, neglect);
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;
persons learning a second or a foreign language;
and for (psycho-)linguistic evaluation of syntactic abilities of healthy persons and of children in the process of acquiring their first language.
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, 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 as well as a French and Italian translation of the verbs. The verbs are presently being translated into several other languages. A multiple choice sentence comprehension task and a sentence production task are also given in the manual.
ELA can be used effectively by cognitive rehabilitation therapists, (psycho-)linguists, neurolinguists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, occupational therapists, psychologists, special education teachers, speech and language therapists, teachers of English as a foreign language and foreign language teachers.
The sets differ in terms of their main goals and contents. Set 3 consists of sequences of photo cards with which texts or stories on various aspects of daily life can be produced, e.g. writing a letter, shaving, brushing one's teeth, working on a computer, a hospital stay, etc. The length of the text can vary from three to fifteen or more photo cards.