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At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

PubMed1992

Cohesion repairs in the narratives of normal-language and language-disordered school-age children.

The self-initiated repairs produced by 14 normal-language and 14 language-disordered children during a story retelling task are described. When grammatical repairs and repairs to text meaning were analysed, no group differences were found for either repair type. Both groups initiated significantly more repairs to text meaning. When repairs to text meaning were probed for the cohesive aspects of the repair activity, there were no group differences for the frequency or the types of cohesive repairs that were initiated. However, differences were significant for the success of the cohesive repair attempts and for the location of the repairs. Normal-language and language-disordered children appear to share similar strategies for monitoring narrative discourse, but they differ in their abilities to actualize their monitoring attention.

Child↗

PubMed1999

Local norming of the test of adolescent/adult language-3 in the Ottawa Speech and Language Study.

The young adult norms for the Test of Adolescent/Adult Language-3 (TOAL-3; D. Hammill et al., 1994) are based only on individuals who pursued postsecondary education, a restriction that renders the norms inappropriate for many clinical and research purposes. This research note details the rationale, methods, and results of a local norming of the TOAL-3 spoken language subtests, based on participants from the Ottawa Speech and Language Study (C. J. Johnson et al., 1999). The resulting Ottawa norms represent the full range of young adult language abilities and, therefore, can be used with caution for some clinical and research purposes.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

[Language promotion in kindergartens in Biberach county--an analysis of the state foundation subsidized language intervention project].

The Programme Sprachförderung im Kindergarten was carried out in 83 nursery-schools in the Landkreis Biberach/Germany from fall 2003 till summer 2004. The Programme was offered by the Kreisgesundheitsamt des Landkreises Biberach in cooperation with the Sozial- und Jugendamt and the Hör-Sprachzentrum Ravensburg and contained a language-intervention programme and a training for the nursery-school teachers. Language screenings where conducted at the beginning and the end of the programme including 1479 Children of the age of 4 - 6 years. 23 % of the native German and 62 % of the migrant children showed a need for intervention. These children where fostered with the Ravensburger Modell for 6 months. The increase in performance was highly significant. Nevertheless the fostered children could not achieve the performance level of the native German children without language retardation with the exception of two tasks (word families and understanding of questions). The most significant increase in performance showed the poorest performers of the intervention-group. According to the increase in performance the programme was successful, but also obviously too short for the poorer performers to catch up. Therefore we advise further language-intervention programmes in nursery-schools to be conducted as early as possible. Furthermore analytical observation and supervision must be standard to maintain a high level of effectiveness.

Child Development↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Learning an invented inflectional morpheme in Spanish by children with typical language skills and with specific language impairment (SLI).

Cross-linguistic research on SLI has suggested that how the disorder is manifested depends on the ambient language. For example, research on Italian indicates that SLI children do not present difficulties with verb inflection, when compared with MLU-matched peers. This pattern contrasts with what has been reported for English-speaking children. The present investigation sought to examine SLI children's use of inflectional morphology through a language teaching task similar to that used by Connell (1987) and Connell and Stone (1992). To address cross-linguistic differences, children were speakers of a language similar to Italian in its verb agreement paradigm. Sixteen Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking with SLI and 16 age-matched controls were taught a subject-verb agreement suffix that established the subject's gender. Half the children in each group were taught the new form via imitation. The rest of the participants were trained via a modeling procedure. Both comprehension and production of the target form were assessed. Results indicated significant differences across the SLI and typical groups for both comprehension and production of the inflectional morpheme, regardless of instructional strategy. These findings contradict what has been observed in previous studies on teaching an invented rule to children with SLI. They also suggest that inflectional morphology may be problematic even for children who are learning a morphologically rich language. The explanatory power of the process account and the linguistic account of SLI are explored as these pertain to the present findings, and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Case-Control Studies↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Representing information in patient reports using natural language processing and the extensible markup language.

OBJECTIVE: To design a document model that provides reliable and efficient access to clinical information in patient reports for a broad range of clinical applications, and to implement an automated method using natural language processing that maps textual reports to a form consistent with the model. METHODS: A document model that encodes structured clinical information in patient reports while retaining the original contents was designed using the extensible markup language (XML), and a document type definition (DTD) was created. An existing natural language processor (NLP) was modified to generate output consistent with the model. Two hundred reports were processed using the modified NLP system, and the XML output that was generated was validated using an XML validating parser. RESULTS: The modified NLP system successfully processed all 200 reports. The output of one report was invalid, and 199 reports were valid XML forms consistent with the DTD. CONCLUSIONS: Natural language processing can be used to automatically create an enriched document that contains a structured component whose elements are linked to portions of the original textual report. This integrated document model provides a representation where documents containing specific information can be accurately and efficiently retrieved by querying the structured components. If manual review of the documents is desired, the salient information in the original reports can also be identified and highlighted. Using an XML model of tagging provides an additional benefit in that software tools that manipulate XML documents are readily available.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

Neural correlates of British sign language comprehension: spatial processing demands of topographic language.

In all signed languages used by deaf people, signs are executed in "sign space" in front of the body. Some signed sentences use this space to map detailed "real-world" spatial relationships directly. Such sentences can be considered to exploit sign space "topographically." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the extent to which increasing the topographic processing demands of signed sentences was reflected in the differential recruitment of brain regions in deaf and hearing native signers of the British Sign Language. When BSL signers performed a sentence anomaly judgement task, the occipito-temporal junction was activated bilaterally to a greater extent for topographic than nontopographic processing. The differential role of movement in the processing of the two sentence types may account for this finding. In addition, enhanced activation was observed in the left inferior and superior parietal lobules during processing of topographic BSL sentences. We argue that the left parietal lobe is specifically involved in processing the precise configuration and location of hands in space to represent objects, agents, and actions. Importantly, no differences in these regions were observed when hearing people heard and saw English translations of these sentences. Despite the high degree of similarity in the neural systems underlying signed and spoken languages, exploring the linguistic features which are unique to each of these broadens our understanding of the systems involved in language comprehension.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2001

Chimpanzee sign language and Darwinian continuity: evidence for a neurological continuity for language.

The current article addresses the empirical validity of the Cartesian view of language by first examining a sample of the results generated by over 30 years of chimpanzee sign language studies and then examining some neurological and behavioral data that accounts for the similarity between human and nonhuman communication systems. Finally an attempt will be made to propose a unified model of language that accounts for these findings and shows how the Cartesian world view has proposed a theory of language that is incomplete.

Animals↗

PubMed1980

Effect of elicitation variables on analysis of language samples for normal and language-disordered children.

To evaluate the effect of elicitation stimuli and situations, expressive language samples were obtained from 10 normal children and 10 language-disordered children in four location-stimulus combinations and from wireless radio telemetry. These language samples were analyzed using the procedures of Developmental Sentence Scoring, Mean Length of Utterance, and inflectional scoring. No differences existed between the locations of home and clinic, but significant differences were noted among samples elicited using pictures as oppossed to open-ended questions as compared to telemetry samples. Normal and language-disordered children responded differently to these elicitation variables. Open-ended questions and telemetry yielded the highest performances on Developmental Sentence Scoring and inflectional scoring. Telemetry samples yielded the shortest response lengths. The two groups of children also responded differently in the specific scoring categories.

Child↗

PubMed1992

Characteristics of children with specific language impairment attending language units.

The characteristics of children with specific language impairment (SLI) attending four language units in the north-west of England are examined. The present study involved 15 children with SLI and two sets of control groups: a same-age group and an MLU-matched group (MLU = mean length of utterance). Results are discussed in terms of the following questions: Do children with SLI attending language units fit the classic definition of SLI? Can children with SLI be categorised as having expressive versus receptive language problems? What other aspects of educational attainment such as reading, maths and science are affected by SLI? The paper ends with implications for future research.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Content mazes and filled pauses in narrative language samples of children with specific language impairment.

Linguistic nonfluencies known as mazes (filled pauses, repetitions, revisions, and abandoned utterances) have been used to draw inferences about processing difficulties associated with the production of language. In children with normal language development (NL), maze frequency in general increases with linguistic complexity, being greater in narrative than conversational contexts and in longer utterances. The same tendency has been found for children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, the frequency of mazes produced by children with NL and SLI has not been compared directly at equivalent utterance lengths in narration. This study compared the frequency of filled pauses and content mazes in narrative language samples of school-age children with SLI. The children with SLI used significantly more content mazes than the children with NL, but fewer filled pauses. Unlike content mazes, the frequency of filled pauses remained stable across samples of different utterance lengths among children with SLI. This indicates that filled pauses and content mazes have different origins and should not be analyzed or interpreted in the same way.

Child↗

PubMed1982

Language onset and concomitant speech and language problems in subgroups of stutterers and their siblings.

Time of language onset and frequencies of speech and language problems were examined in stutterers and their nonstuttering siblings. These families were grouped according to six characteristics of the index stutterer: sex, recovery or persistence of stuttering, and positive or negative family history of stuttering. Stutterers and their nonstuttering same-sex siblings were found to be distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Comparisons of six subgroups of stutterers and their respective nonstuttering siblings showed no significant differences in the number of their reported articulation problems. Stutterers who were reported to be late talkers did not differ from their nonstuttering siblings in the frequency of their articulation problems, but these two groups had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings.

Articulation Disorders↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Teaching a foreign language using multisensory structured language techniques to at-risk learners: a review.

An overview of multisensory structured language (MSL) techniques used to teach a foreign language to at-risk students is outlined. Research supporting the use of MSL techniques is reviewed. Specific activities using the MSL approach to teach the phonology/orthography, grammar and vocabulary of the foreign language as well as reading and communicative activities in the foreign language are presented.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Reflections on foreign language study for students with language learning problems: research, issues and challenges.

The study of foreign language (FL) learning for individuals who have found learning to read and write in their first language extremely problematic has been an under-researched area throughout the world. Since the 1980s, Leonore Ganschow and Richard Sparks have conducted pioneering research into the nature of difficulties, why they are encountered and how they can be minimized. In this paper the authors trace the development of their research on foreign language difficulties for students with language learning problems. They provide a summary of their findings and suggest new questions and directions for the field.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1978

Computer-assisted analysis of written language: assessing the written language of deaf children.

Methods for assessing the written language of deaf students are reviewed. The merits and shortcomings of various objective indicators that have traditionally been used are discussed. These include various measures of total output, such as total number of words or sentences, and simple measures of diversity of usage such as the type-token ratio. There have been several attempts in recent years to include objective measures of syntactic complexity as part of an overall language assessment program. The use of a computer to assist teachers in the derivation of such syntactic measures is described. Two illustrative examples are provided. The first shows how the computer system performs a detailed syntactic analysis on a typical sentence taken from the written language of a deaf child. The second example shows how the system provides a summary analysis of several sentences in a theme. A statistical count of the syntactic forms used in the written language sample is provided at the end of the analysis.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

Topic manipulation and conversational participation as a function of familiarity in school-age language-impaired and normal language peers.

This study investigated the topic manipulation skills and conversational participation of school-age language-impaired children (LI) in interactions with normal language peers. The subjects consisted of eight dyads of a normal language child and a language-impaired child balanced for approximate age and sex. They ranged in age from 5.11 to 7.11 years of age. The subjects participated in two conversations in order to explore the effects of familiarity on conversational participation. The subjects were unfamiliar with each other before the study began. Fifteen to twenty minutes of discourse were taped, transcribed, and analyzed for the number and proportion of topics maintained, topics introduced, topics reintroduced, topics shaded, and the number and proportion of back channel responses produced in Session 1 and Session 2. A behavioral measure was included to clarify whether conversational nonassertiveness was related to a behavioral style of interaction. No significant differences were found between the LI children and the normal children for the number and proportion of topics maintained, topics introduced, or topics shaded. However, the LI subjects did produce significantly more topic reintroductions than the normal subjects. The number and proportion of back channel responses was not found to differ significantly between the two groups. A familiarity effect was demonstrated by a reduction in the number of utterances produced in Session 2 as compared to Session 1 as the children interacted less in the second conversation. Several interpretations of the results are discussed.

Child↗

PubMed1990

Modifications of speech language levels by preservice educators based on language features.

Increased efforts to mainstream handicapped learners have been accompanied by a growing concern for the ability of mainstream educators to accommodate the special needs of these students. A particular concern involves the ability of mainstream educators to adjust their levels of spoken language when conversing with hearing-impaired learners. The present study compared the language levels produced by preservice educators with either high or low levels of previous experience with hearing-impaired individuals. Results indicated that (1) neither group adjusted their spoken language to levels understood by two hearing-impaired women and (2) members of the high experience group produced higher language levels than members of the low experience group. Discussion of these results focuses on implications for interactions with hearing-impaired learners.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Is it culture or is it language? Examination of language effects in cross-cultural research on categorization.

Differences in reasoning styles between Chinese and European Americans held even when controlling for the language of testing. Bilingual Chinese organized objects in a more relational and less categorical way than European Americans, whether tested in English or in Chinese. Thus, culture affects categorization independent of the testing language. Nevertheless, language affected some Chinese bilinguals' categorization. The responses of Chinese from the Mainland and Taiwan were more relational when tested in Chinese than when tested in English. Responses of Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore were equally relational when tested in Chinese and in English. Age and context of learning English are discussed to explain the differential language effects among different Chinese groups. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

African American and Caucasian preschoolers' use of decontextualized language: literate language features in oral narratives.

PURPOSE: Low-income preschoolers' use of literate language features in oral narratives across three age groups (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) and two ethnic groups (Caucasian and African American) was examined. METHOD: Sixty-seven preschoolers generated a story using a wordless picture book. The literate language features examined were simple and complex elaborated noun phrases, adverbs, conjunctions, and mental/linguistic verbs. RESULTS: Literate language features occurred at measurable rates for 3- to 5-year-old children. Conjunction use was positively associated with the use of complex elaborated noun phrases and adverbs, and the use of complex and simple elaborated noun phrases was inversely related. There were no differences between African American and Caucasian children's usage rates. Age-related differences were observed in the use of mental/linguistic verbs and conjunctions. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: The importance of supporting decontextualized language skills during the preschool period is discussed.

Black or African American↗