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Biomedical subjects

L B Leonard

Publications and source records attributed to L B Leonard.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Vowel duration in mothers' speech to young children.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether content words are selectively highlighted through increased vowel duration in mothers' speech to young children. Fifteen mother-child dyads served as subjects. All children (ages 1:6-2:4) were female and had a mean length of utterance between 1.00 and 1.40 morphemes. Each mother was asked to read five experimental stories aloud to her child and to an adult. The vowel durations of both content words and function words in these stories were examined. Vowels in content words--but not function words--were significantly longer in child-directed than in adult-directed speech. It is suggested that this characteristic of child-directed speech might heighten young children's attention to content words and contribute to the exclusion of function words during the early stages of English language development.

Female↗
PubMed1992

Grammatical morphology and speech perception in children with specific language impairment.

Many English-speaking children with specific language impairment have been found to be especially weak in their use of grammatical morphology. In a separate literature, many children meeting the same subject description have shown significant limitations on tasks involving the perception of rapid acoustic changes. In this study, we attempted to determine whether there were parallels between the grammatical morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment and their performance profiles across several perceptual contrasts. Because most English grammatical morphemes have shorter durations relative to adjacent morphemes in the speech stream, we hypothesized that children with specific language impairment would be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions. Results from a group of eight children with specific language impairment with documented morphological difficulties confirmed these predictions. Several possible accounts of the observed morphology-perception parallels are offered.

Child↗
PubMed1991

Unusual phonological patterns and their underlying representations: a case study.

An unusual phonological pattern exhibited by a child aged 2;9 is described. The pattern involved the production of word-final strident continuants in words whose adult forms contain these features in initial, rather than final position (e.g. [ops] for soap). The data are interpreted as compatible with models of child phonology that permit direct mapping of features to final position.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed1991

Subject case marking and verb morphology in normally developing and specifically language-impaired children.

Recent theories of language development propose a direct relationship between children's use of verb morphology and their use of subject case pronouns. Such proposals might contribute to an understanding of specifically language-impaired (SLI) children's difficulties. These children's extraordinary problems with verb morphology are well documented, and preliminary evidence indicates frequent pronoun case errors (e.g., her for she) in their speech. Thus, it is possible that a collection of difficulties may be linked to a common source in these children. The objectives of this study were to determine: (a) whether subject case marking, as well as verb morphology was more limited in the speech of a group of SLI children than in the speech of a younger group of normally developing (ND) children matched for mean utterance length; (b) whether a relationship between the use of subject case marking and the use of verb morphology existed in the speech of the ND children; and, if so, (c) whether this relationship is evident in the SLI children as well, in spite of their more limited use of these features. The results revealed that the SLI children were more limited than the ND children in the use of both subject case marking and verb morphology. However, a relationship between the two types of usage was found in both groups of children.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

New trends in the study of early language acquisition.

Although young children do not typically produce their first words until the 2nd year of life, the findings reviewed above make it clear that by the end of their 1st year, children know a great deal about the language spoken around them. Evidence of this sort is sobering for those of us who are responsible for the identification of communicative problems in children. Each month that passes in the child's 1st year could well represent a possible opportunity to remove or apply some external factor, or to foster some compensatory skill. However, from another standpoint these data should be welcome, for they serve as a powerful justification for advocating early intervention.

Humans↗
PubMed1989

The acquisition of agglutinating languages: converging evidence from Tamil.

The acquisition of verb inflections in Tamil, an agglutinating language, was investigated in three 2-year-old children. The findings revealed a high percentage use of verb inflections indicating tense, aspect, modality, person, number and gender by all three children. Explanations for this early, almost error-free acquisition are discussed in terms of the facilitating properties of agglutinating languages.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1989

Facilitating word-finding skills of language-impaired children.

Two language-impaired children and their controls participated in a preliminary study designed to examine the effects of treatment on word-finding skills. The 2 children participated in activities designed to improve the elaboration and/or retrieval of the training words, whereas their controls received a therapeutic regimen that did not target word-finding skills. Treatment effects were apparent, with the greatest gains associated with activities focusing on both elaboration and retrieval. Although the findings were promising, several procedural details complicated interpretation of the data.

Child↗
PubMed1989

Unusual phonological behavior and the avoidance of homonymy in children.

Young children sometimes make use of unusual phonological patterns even when they already possess the appropriate sound or a suitable substitute in their phonological systems. In this investigation, we attempted to determine whether in such instances unusual sound changes enable children to avoid potential homonymy with other words in their lexicons. Novel words were presented to children, half serving as potential homonyms, half as unlikely homonyms. The children's acquisition of these words was monitored. For a group of normally developing children, unusual sound changes were found to be more frequent in the words with the potential for homonymy. In contrast, a group of children with specific language impairment showed the same degree of unusual usage for both types of words. The findings suggest that children with specific language impairment are especially limited in their ability to capitalize on the phonetic regularities of the language.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1988

Government-Binding Theory and some of its applications: a tutorial.

Government-Binding Theory is the dominant theory of grammar in present-day linguistics, and is receiving increasing attention from investigators of normal and disordered language behavior. This paper serves as a general introduction to the theory and provides a number of examples of its application.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1987

Specific language impairment in children: a cross-linguistic study.

A common profile in English-speaking specifically language-impaired children is a moderate deficit across a broad range of linguistic features and a more marked, selective impairment in using bound morphemes and components of the verb system. To gain a clearer understanding of the nature of these more serious problems, we examined the speech of monolingual Italian-speaking as well as English-speaking children with specific language impairment. The evidence suggested that phonological factors contributed significantly to these children's extraordinary problems with particular linguistic features. Contrary to expectations, other marked deficits seemed more related to the opacity of the rules involved and homonymity with other morphemes than to problems with formal grammatical devices in general or components of the verb system in particular.

Child↗
PubMed1986

Conversational replies of children with specific language impairment.

Conversational replies were examined in two groups of children with comparable vocabularies and speech limited to single-word utterances: children with specific language impairment, ages 2:10 to 3:6 (years:months); and children, ages 1:5 to 1:11, who were developing language normally. In interactions with adults the language-impaired children produced a greater number and variety of replies to both questions and statements than the normal-language children. The findings suggest that language-impaired children can serve as responsive conversationalists when syntactic skill is not a factor and that comprehension, world knowledge, and/or experience with conversations permit considerable variability in conversational skill even within the same level of expressive language ability.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1985

Unusual and subtle phonological behavior in the speech of phonologically disordered children.

Evidence is reviewed regarding three types of unusual and/or subtle phonological behaviors in the speech of phonologically disordered children. The models of child phonology that are compatible with these behaviors are then discussed. Considered are the nature of the child's stored forms for words, the types of rules operating on these forms as well as those responsible for the surface form of the words, and the nature of the phonological categories reflected in the child's usage. The paper concludes with the implications these considerations have for assessment and treatment.

Child↗