Biomedical subjects

C Dollaghan

Publications and source records attributed to C Dollaghan.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Nonword repetition and child language impairment.

A brief, processing-dependent, nonword repetition task, designed to minimize biases associated with traditional language tests, was investigated. In Study 1, no overlap in nonword repetition performance was found between a group of 20 school-age children enrolled in language intervention (LI) and a group of 20 age-matched peers developing language normally (LN). In Study 2, a comparison of likelihood ratios for the nonword repetition task and for a traditional language test revealed that nonword repetition distinguished between children independently identified as LI and LN with a high degree of accuracy, by contrast with the traditional language test. Nonword repetition may have considerable clinical utility as a screening measure for language impairment in children. Information on the likelihood ratios associated with all diagnostic tests of language is badly needed.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1998

Late talker or SLI?: the story of Jay X.

Distinguishing between children who will "catch up" after delays in early language development (late talkers), and children whose early delays are a harbinger of the condition known as specific language impairment (SLI), remains one of the biggest mysteries facing speech-language pathologists who work with young children. The case of Jay X, a preschool child with a history of delayed language acquisition, illustrates the process by which the crucial pieces of clinical information are accumulated and interpreted to make this determination.

Child Development↗

PubMed1997

Reducing bias in language assessment: processing-dependent measures.

One potential solution to the problem of eliminating bias in language assessment is to identify valid measures that are not affected by subjects' prior knowledge or experience. In this study, 156 randomly selected school-age boys (31% majority; 69% minority) participated in three "processing-dependent" language measures, designed to minimize the contributions of prior knowledge on performance; and one traditional "knowledge-dependent" language test. As expected, minority subjects obtained significantly lower scores than majority participants on the knowledge-dependent test, but the groups did not differ on any of the processing- dependent measures. These results suggest that processing-dependent measures hold considerable promise for distinguishing between children with language disorders, whose poor language performance reflects fundamental psycholinguistic deficits, and children with language differences attributable to differing experiential backgrounds.

Achievement↗

PubMed1993

Constituent syllable effects in a nonsense-word repetition task.

Multisyllabic nonsense-word repetition tasks have been used to provide evidence on the phonological processing operations of children with language impairment, independent of their lexical knowledge (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990; Kamhi, Catts, Mauer, Apel, & Gentry, 1988). However, recent evidence (Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, & Baddeley, 1991) and speculation (Snowling, Chiat, & Hulme, 1991) suggest that the nonsense words employed in such tasks may not be equally "nonsensical." The present investigation directly tested the effect on repetition performance of one previously uncontrolled characteristic of multisyllabic nonsense words: the lexical status (word or nonword) of their stressed syllables. Normally achieving school-age boys repeated nonsense words with lexical stressed syllables significantly more accurately than nonsense words with nonlexical stressed syllables. These results suggest the need to control, at a minimum, the lexical status of constituent syllables in constructing nonsense-word stimuli.

Child↗

PubMed1986

A comprehension monitoring program for language-impaired children.

Four language-impaired children (5:10-8:2) participated in an intervention program designed to improve their comprehension monitoring skills. A set of audiotaped adequate and inadequate messages was presented through the baseline and treatment phases of a multiple-baseline across subjects design, with the dependent variable being the percentage of inadequate messages that were verbally queried. Results revealed rapid increases in verbal queries of five types of inadequate messages in conjunction with progress through the comprehension monitoring treatment program. High levels of comprehension monitoring were maintained following a nontreatment interval of 3-6 weeks. Facilitation of comprehension monitoring skills appears to be a feasible and fruitful adjunct to traditional language intervention objectives.

Child↗

PubMed1985

Child meets word: "fast mapping" in preschool children.

"Fast mapping" (Carey & Bartlett, 1978) is a hypothesized process enabling children to rapidly create lexical representations for the unfamiliar words they encounter. In this study, 35 normal preschool children, ages 2:1-5:11 (years:months), were exposed to a monosyllabic nonsense word and its novel object referent. On first exposure, 91% of the subjects inferred the connection between the novel word and referent. After this single encounter, 81% correctly identified the referent on hearing its label a second time. After hearing the new word twice, 45% were able to produce at least two of its three phonemes in labeling the novel referent. Of those children who did not attempt to label the novel referent, a significant percentage recognized the correct label. In addition, a significant percentage of subjects recalled some nonlinguistic information associated with the referent. Normal preschoolers appear to create fast mappings containing a great deal of linguistic and nonlinguistic information on the basis of even brief, casual encounters with new words.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed1982

The use of communication boards in a residential setting: an evaluation.

This study examines the use of communication boards by seven nonspeaking, nonambulatory, severely mentally retarded students (all functioning at an early preoperational level cognitively) interacting with their teachers in a residential classroom setting. The authors present a method by which the spontaneous use of communication boards can be assessed as to actual functionality in meeting the students' communicative needs. The students' reliance on and success with their communication boards were analyzed relative to nonboard modes (e.g., gestures and vocalizations). Analysis of videotaped nonspeaking student-teacher interactions revealed that these students rarely used their communication boards despite their severe inability to convey messages by any other means. Use of the communication boards rather than alternate modes neither increased the likelihood of success nor decreased the ambiguity of student messages. Communication boards thus appeared to add little to the communicative competence of these students in interacting with their teachers. These findings are discussed in terms of the need to assess nonspeaking persons' use of augmentative systems outside the speech-language pathology setting, in order to begin to identify, explain, and treat communication breakdowns arising from interactions between nonspeaking persons and those with whom they attempt to interact in their daily living experiences.

Adolescent↗