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PubMed1982

Responses to requests in the dialogues of mothers and their stage 1 children.

The development of conversation requires children to learn to relate their utterances to utterances from other speakers. This investigation examined one method in which children relate their utterances to preceding utterances in conversation, namely, response utterances to request utterances. Late Stage 1 children's responses were examined for their pragmatic and semantic relationships to five types of requests used by mothers. Conditional (child responses to mother's requests) and unconditional (child responses following mother's utterances) probabilities were generated using the lag sequential analysis. The level of significant difference between the conditional and unconditional probabilities was determined with the binomial distribution. The results indicate that the children produced contingent linguistic responses to the mothers' requests based on the pragmatic intent of the requests--specifically, those requesting semantic information, clarifying a misunderstood remark, and requesting agreement or disagreement with a proposition. Further, the children's responses to the mothers' requests for semantic information provided the appropriate semantic information requested by the mothers. The children produced contingent nonlinguistic responses to the mothers' requests for an action to be performed, whereas contingent nonlinguistic or linguistic responses following the mothers' requests for attention failed to achieve significance. These findings indicate that responses to requests are important in the development of early contingent speech and provide one means for structuring conversation with Late Stage I children.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Examination of candidate genes in language disorder: a model of genetic association for treatment studies.

The purpose of this review is to provide a model for studying genetic association of response to intervention in child language disorders. In addition to a theoretical overview and review of different approaches to studying candidate genes, a specific methodology for completing this type of analysis is presented. The goal of the analysis is to provide detail beyond simple broad phenotyping for affected and nonaffected individuals and to take advantage of data yielded from concise behavioral phenotyping often available in treatment studies.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1998

Language development in children with simple-partial left-hemisphere epilepsy.

The nature of cerebral involvement in the acquisition of language was addressed in this longitudinal study of children with an early diagnosis of epilepsy with simple-partial seizures (SPE) and with epileptogenic foci localized in the left frontal (LF) lobe. Yearly evaluations of six SPE-LF children on tests of linguistic comprehension (pointing, understanding of narrative, and understanding of prepositions) and production (repetition, lexical diversity, and grammatical production) were carried out between the ages of 3 and 8 years and compared to those of large samples of control children on the same tasks and at each age level. Linguistic production of all children were transcribed, coded, and analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney & Snow, 1991). Individual evolution trajectories revealed that SPE-LF children showed a clear dissociation in linguistic performance between comprehension and production. Linguistic comprehension gradually improved to reach normal performance levels by age 7 while linguistic production, even at later stages, remained quite poor. This dissociation in the development of linguistic performance in SPE-LF children suggests a complex interplay between brain maturation dynamics and dysfunction modulating the succession of stages in language development. The observed persistent deficits in specific aspects of linguistic performance argue for an early involvement of the anterior areas of the left cerebral hemisphere in the production of language.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2000

Do young children have adult syntactic competence?

Many developmental psycholinguists assume that young children have adult syntactic competence, this assumption being operationalized in the use of adult-like grammars to describe young children's language. This "continuity assumption" has never had strong empirical support, but recently a number of new findings have emerged - both from systematic analyses of children's spontaneous speech and from controlled experiments - that contradict it directly. In general, the key finding is that most of children's early linguistic competence is item based, and therefore their language development proceeds in a piecemeal fashion with virtually no evidence of any system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. For a variety of reasons, these findings are not easily explained in terms of the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other "external" factors. The framework of an alternative, usage-based theory of child language acquisition - relying explicitly on new models from Cognitive-Functional Linguistics - is presented.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: same problem, different solutions-evidence from Dutch.

This paper focuses on verb movement in agrammatism and child language. We present data from a sentence completion experiment with 6 Dutch agrammatic aphasics and 21 Dutch-speaking children. The experiment compares completion of matrix clauses (which require verb movement) and embedded clauses (where such movement is not required) in these two populations. The results reveal a clear asymmetry: Both agrammatics and children do very well with embedded clauses but fail in 50% with the matrix clauses. It is concluded that the problem which both populations are facing is one of verb movement rather than verb inflection. An error analysis of the responses reveals that, although both agrammatics and children try to avoid movement, they apply different strategies to achieve this goal.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The effect of conversational setting on topic continuation in mother-child dyads.

Twelve children (five boys and seven girls, mean age 4; I) interacted with their mothers in two conversational settings: playing with a favourite toy and helping to prepare lunch or muffins. The percentage of two topic continuation processes--topic incorporation and collaboration--used by mothers and children was analysed. It was hypothesized that the help setting with a predetermined structure would elicit a greater percentage of topic incorporation by the dyads than the play setting. In fact, the play setting elicited a greater percentage of topic incorporation from mothers than the help setting. Children did not differ significantly in the percentage of use of topic incorporation between the two settings, but appeared to be equally proficient in incorporating topics in settings with and without a predetermined structure. The play setting also elicited more topic collaboration from the children than the help setting. While the help setting appeared to support collaborative action, the play setting permitted the dyads to be informative about the toys as well as related topics. Therefore, the two settings provided different opportunities for the dyads to continue topics.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

Relations between prosodic variables and communicative functions.

Three children were observed interacting with their mothers at three different times: before the onset of single words, when vocabulary consisted of 10 words, and when vocabulary consisted of 50 words. Relations between communicative functions and acoustic analyses of prosodic variables (i.e. rise vs. nonrise of terminal contours) were studied. Considerable variability was found among the children in the number of rises produced overall and those produced for any function. Each child's use of rise was fairly constant over time and rises were produced relatively more frequently than nonrises with functions requiring a response from the listener. Factors affecting similarities and differences are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1987

Mother-child transactions in families with normal and handicapped children.

This paper describes two aspects of mother-child interaction: children's contribution to early conversations and mother's tactics for eliciting verbal responses. Normal and handicapped children matched for linguistic complexity (mean length of utterance) differed in both qualitative and quantitative aspects of their verbal interactions with their mothers. Normal children talked more, responded correctly more often, and made more attempts to control the conversation than mentally retarded children. Clear differences in mother choice of tactics for eliciting child verbalizations also were evident between the two groups. Overall, mothers of handicapped children modeled responses more and frequently asked fewer and less complex questions. The differences in mother behavior appeared to be a function of the child's specific skills, and not of the child's general classification as normal or mentally retarded; patterns of mother linguistic adjustment were identical in the two groups. These findings are discussed in terms of a general model of transactional linguistic teaching in dyads with mentally retarded children.

Child↗
PubMed2003

Parent-mediated early intervention for young children with autism spectrum disorder.

BACKGROUND: Recent estimates concerning the prevalence of autistic spectrum disorder are much higher than those reported 30 years ago, with at least 1 in 400 children affected. This group of children and families have important service needs. The involvement of parents in implementing intervention strategies designed to help their autistic children has long been accepted as helpful. The potential benefits are increased skills and reduced stress for parents as well as children. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this review was to determine the extent to which parent-mediated early intervention has been shown to be effective in the treatment of children aged 1 year to 6 years 11 months with autistic spectrum disorder. In particular, it aimed to assess the effectiveness of such interventions in terms of the benefits for both children and their parents. SEARCH STRATEGY: A range of psychological, educational and biomedical databases were searched. Bibliographies and reference lists of key articles were searched, field experts were contacted and key journals were hand searched. SELECTION CRITERIA: Only randomised or quasi-randomised studies were included. Study interventions had a significant focus on parent-implemented early intervention, compared to a group of children who received no treatment, a waiting list group or a different form of intervention. There was at least one objective, child related outcome measure. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Appraisal of the methodological quality of included studies was carried out independently by two reviewers. Differences between the included studies in terms of the type of intervention, the comparison groups used and the outcome measures were too great to allow for direct comparison. MAIN RESULTS: The results of this review are based on data from two studies. Two significant results were found to favour parent training in one study: child language and maternal knowledge of autism. In the other, intensive intervention (involving parents, but primarily delivered by professionals) was associated with better child outcomes on direct measurement than were found for parent-mediated early intervention, but no differences were found in relation to measures of parent and teacher perceptions of skills and behaviours. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS: This review has little to offer in the way of implications for practice: there were only two studies, the numbers of participants included were small, and the two studies could not be compared directly to one another. In terms of research, randomised controlled trials involving large samples need to be carried out, involving both short and long-term outcome information and full economic evaluations. Research in this area is hampered by barriers to randomisation, such as availability of equivalent services.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1993

Nouns in early lexicons: evidence, explanations and implications.

Many theories of grammatical and lexical acquisition assume that children learn predominantly nouns, and specifically names of objects, when they first begin to acquire words in the second year. We show that the noun bias in early vocabularies is far from universal, and that it rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at 1;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes, but that of the nouns acquired only about half are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCs). An examination of the use of nouns in mother-child discourse shows that non-object words referencing locations, actions and events, for example, are used in distinctive pragmatic and grammatical contexts which might enable a child to grasp the word's use and eventually its meaning. It is concluded that a theory of lexical acquisition in discourse context is required to explain word learning at all levels and for all word types. Implications for semantic bootstrapping theories are considered.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Mother-child synchrony and communicative reciprocity in late-talking toddlers.

Eighteen mother-child dyads that included 24- to 31-month-old boys who were late talkers were compared in terms of social cues and dyadic synchrony with dyads including normally developing boys matched with the other boys in terms of SES and nonverbal ability. Mothers of late talkers did not differ from comparison group mothers in degree of synchrony with their children nor in their use of social cues. Similarly, late talkers did not differ from comparison children in play synchrony, compliance, or overall communicativeness, although they made significantly fewer clear verbalizations, produced significantly more unintelligible utterances, and relied more heavily on gestural and nonverbal communicative cues. Dyads with late talkers manifested stronger patterns of relationship between the variables studied than comparison dyads, with highly controlling mothers tending to be low in synchrony and to have children who were low in both compliance and synchrony.

Child Language↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The time to talk: the influence of the timing of adult-child talk on children's event memory.

To investigate the influence of the nature and timing of adult-child talk on event recall, this study engaged 63 three-year-olds and 65 five-year-olds in a staged event and interviewed them 2 weeks later. Children were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: elaborative pre-, during-, and post-talk, and empty talk (during the event). Children in the elaborative, relative to the empty, talk conditions made fewer errors. Furthermore, post-talk had the greatest influence on correct recall, although for the 5-year-olds, during-talk was also facilitative. Recall was enhanced to a greater extent by the child's contribution to the talk, relative to that of the adult. The findings contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms by which adult-child conversations influence recall.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Slips of the tongue in very young children.

This paper investigates the difference in the frequency with which adults and young children make slips of the tongue. The slips analyzed were taken from two corpora of speech. The first consists of the speech of one child in interaction with her mother; the second corpus consists of the speech of eight children in interaction with their teacher. The results suggest that young children make significantly fewer slips than do adults. This finding is consistent with a psychoanalytic understanding of slips--i.e., that young children should make fewer slips because they are less inclined to suppress and repress ideas and impulses.

Child Language↗