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Biomedical subjects

J A Rondal

Publications and source records attributed to J A Rondal.

16 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Françoise, a fifteen-year follow up.

A fifteen-year follow up of the linguistic and cognitive profile of a woman, named Françoise, with standard trisomy 21. She had been studied in considerable detail between 1987 and 1991 by Rondal (1995) and found to have exceptionally good language abilities in advance of regular cognitive abilities for a person with Down syndrome. Françoise's psychological functioning has been deteriorating relatively rapidly over the last two years. A severe deterioration of her previously excellent receptive language abilities is documented in the present study. Productively, her on-line word finding is becoming problematic, mean length of utterance has halved compared with 15 years ago, and production of compound sentences is reduced. However, basic phonological and morphosyntactic skills are preserved. Françoise's changing profile during the latter years seems to mirror that documented in the first stages of Alzheimer disease in ageing adults in the general population.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1998

Cases of exceptional language in mental retardation and Down syndrome: explanatory perspectives.

Recent studies of exceptional language development and functioning in mentally retarded people raise questions regarding basic issues in language disorders. These studies are summarised and their implications discussed. Possible reasons for the existence of such cases are examined including language training, general cognitive functioning, working memory, cerebral dominance, and deep-seated variation at brain level.

Cognition↗
PubMed1995

Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives.

Previous work has demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This actionality effect has been reported to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5; 0-7; 11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate-argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for non-actional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Input evidence regarding the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis.

The input language addressed to 18 language-learning children (MLU 1.00-3.00) was analysed so as to assess the quality of the semantic-syntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. The correspondence appears to be quite satisfactory with little variation from the lower to the higher MLUs. All the persons and things referred to in the corpora were labelled by the mothers using nouns. All the actions referred to were labelled using verbs. Most of the attributive information was conveyed by adjectives. Spatial information was expressed through the use of spatial prepositions. As to the functional categories, all agents of actions and causes of events were encoded as subjects of sentences. All patients, themes, sources, goals, locations, and instruments were encoded as objects of sentences (either direct or oblique). This good semantic-syntactic correspondence may make the child's construction of grammatical categories easier.

Child Language↗
PubMed1988

Mean length of utterance of children with Down syndrome.

Mean length of utterance (MLU) of children with Down syndrome was examined and found to correlate highly with chronological age, r = .87, p less than .001, despite the children's language delays. The correlation was reliable at least up to MLU 3.00. In the 1.00 to 3.50 range, MLU also predicted grammatical complexity.

Child↗
PubMed1980

Verbal imitation by Down syndrome and nonretarded children.

Grammatical aspects of the spontaneous repetitions of maternal speech by Down syndrome and nonretarded children were in investigated. Verbal imitations were found to be very similar in grammatical structure for the two groups of children at comparable levels of language development.

Child↗
PubMed1979

Verbal operants in mothers' speech to nonretarded and Down's syndrome children matched for linguistic level.

Verbal response classes produced by mothers speaking to 21 nonretarded children were compared with those of mothers speaking to 21 Down's syndrome children matched with them on mean length of utterance. As mean length of utterance increased, total verbal response classes increased for both groups of mothers and children. Nonretarded children and their mothers produced more echoics; retarded children and their mothers produced more intraverbals. The implications of these findings were discussed in relation to previous research and the teaching of language.

Child↗
PubMed1978

Maternal speech to normal and Down's syndrome children matched for mean length of utterance.

The study was designed to provide data on the maternal linguistic environments of normal and Down's syndrome children at three levels of language development, as assessed by children's mean length of utterances (MLU). The three MLU levels were 1.00--1.50, 1.75--2.25, and 2.50--3.00, respectively. The subjects were 21 Down's syndrome children and their natural mothers and 21 normal children and their natural mothers. Normal children ranged in chronological age from 20 to 32 months and Down's syndrome children from 3 to 12 years. A one-hour verbal interaction between mother and child was tape recorded at home in a free-play situation. Maternal speech was analyzed using 20 measures related to its output-numerical, lexical, syntactical, semantic-structural, semantic-pragmatic, and language-teaching aspects. Additionally, eight measures of children's speech related to the output-numerical, lexical, syntactical semantic-structural aspects, and to imitativeness of maternal speech were computed as a means of testing the validity of the MLU-matching that forms a basis for this study. Except for the Type-token ratio, which favored Down's syndrome children, normal and Down's syndrome children were not found to differ. In contrast, there were numerous differences between the children in the different aspects of speech considered according to language level. None of the comparisons made of mother's speech to normal and to Down's syndrome children led to differences for any of the three children's language levels studied. It appeared that the maternal linguistic environments of language-learning Down's syndrome and normal children of corresponding MLU were similar in most respects. In contrast, there were numerous differences in mother's speech according to the language level of the children addressed. This confirmed that the expressive language level of the children is a far more powerful factor in influencing maternal speech than whether they are normal or Down's syndrome children. The implications of these findings were related to the delay-difference question in the language development of Down's syndrome children and to various interpretations of the effects of maternal linguistic input for language development and for intervention programs of language enhancement in the Down's syndrome child.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Speech rehabilitation in 10 Spanish-speaking children with severe cerebral palsy: a 4-year longitudinal study.

A 4-year longitudinal intervention was conducted with 10 young severely dysarthric children with cerebral palsy. Two procedures were implemented, each one for a period of 2 years. The first procedure centred on training the oral praxies, whereas the second one favoured a more functional approach based on voice and prosody training as well as parents' and school teachers' involvement. Bobath neurodevelopmental treatment was given throughout the 4-year period. Results clearly favour the second type of procedure which in interaction with Bobath's technique proved able to bring the children from unintelligible to an acceptable level of functional speech.

Analysis of Variance↗