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Biomedical subjects

Mary Alt

Publications and source records attributed to Mary Alt.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Factors that influence lexical and semantic fast mapping of young children with specific language impairment.

PURPOSE: This purpose of this study was to investigate the lexical and semantic fast mapping ability of young children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normal language (NL), with a specific emphasis on the influence of phonological factors. METHOD: The study included 46 children (mean age 58 months), half with SLI and half with NL. Children were asked to fast map visual information only, visual-plus-nonlinguistic-auditory information, and visual-plus-linguistic-auditory information. A mixed design was used to compare children across and within groups. RESULTS: Children with SLI performed worse than children with NL overall. The SLI group showed specific deficits in semantic fast mapping when they saw visual information only. This condition may have disrupted encoding because it varied from the expected auditory and visual pattern. The children with SLI also performed poorly when they were asked to map phonotactically infrequent linguistic information and when the difficulty of the task increased. A nonword repetition task was correlated with both semantic and lexical fast mapping. CONCLUSIONS: The findings are discussed in the light of their support for a limited capacity model of processing, as well as the impact of phonology on word learning.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2004

Semantic features in fast-mapping: performance of preschoolers with specific language impairment versus preschoolers with normal language.

This study examined the receptive language skills of young children (4-6 years old) with specific language impairment (SLI). Specifically, the authors looked at their ability to fast-map semantic features of objects and actions and compared it to the performance of age-matched peers with normally developing language (NL). Children completed a computer task during which they were exposed to novel objects and actions with novel names. The children then were asked questions about the semantic features of these novel objects and actions. Overall, the questions about actions were more difficult for children than objects. The children with SLI were able to recognize fewer semantic features than were their peers with NL. They also performed poorly relative to their peers on a lexical label recognition task. These results lend support to the idea that children with SLI have broader difficulties with receptive vocabulary than simply a reduced ability to acquire labels.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Recognition of vocal and facial cues to affect in language-impaired and normally-developing preschoolers.

UNLABELLED: The current study was designed to investigate whether reported difficulties in language-impaired children's ability to identify vocal and facial cues to emotion could be explained at least partially by nonparalinguistic factors. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and control participants received an affect discrimination task, which consisted of the following cue situations: (1) facial expression and unfiltered speech; (2) lowpass-filtered speech only; (3) facial expression only; and (4) facial expression and filtered speech. The results of the study indicated that impaired and nonimpaired group performance differed only for the items including facial expression and nonfiltered speech. Developmental and investigative implications of this finding are addressed. LEARNING OUTCOMES: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to summarize the findings from existing research on affect comprehension in children with language impairments (LI). As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to discuss ways in which language impairment and difficulties in understanding emotion cues are associated and propose how these associations might influence social interactions.

Affect↗