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PubMed1989

Language laterality in Navajo reservation children: dichotic test results depend on the language context of the testing.

Language lateralization in 40 Navajo and 20 Anglo fifth graders was assessed via the Dichotic Consonant-Vowel Task (DCVT). One group of Navajo children was tested by an experimenter who spoke only Navajo with them. The other Navajo group and the Anglo group were tested by an experimenter who spoke only English to them. Strong right ear advantages (REAs) were obtained for the Anglo group and for the Navajo group tested by the Navajo-speaking experimenter. The Navajo group tested by the English-speaking experimenter showed minimal, nonsignificant REAs. Previous findings of an absence of REAs in Native American children failed to consider the possibility that this might occur only when the experimenter does not speak the dominant language of the children. Our results are not consistent with the view that Native Americans are more right hemisphere dominant as a function of an "appositional" mode of language and thought.

Arizona↗

PubMed2006

The role of language in mathematical development: evidence from children with specific language impairments.

A sample (n=48) of eight-year-olds with specific language impairments is compared with age-matched (n=55) and language matched controls (n=55) on a range of tasks designed to test the interdependence of language and mathematical development. Performance across tasks varies substantially in the SLI group, showing profound deficits in production of the count word sequence and basic calculation and significant deficits in understanding of the place-value principle in Hindu-Arabic notation. Only in understanding of arithmetic principles does SLI performance approximate that of age-matched-controls, indicating that principled understanding can develop even where number sequence production and other aspects of number processing are severely compromised.

Child↗

PubMed2005

Amplification of Terminologia anatomica by French language terms using Latin terms matching algorithm: a prototype for other language.

OBJECTIVE: Terminologia anatomica is the new standard in anatomical terminology. This terminology is available only in Latin and English and its worldwide adoption is subject to the addition of terms from others languages. On the other hand, Nomina anatomica, the previous standard, has been widely translated. Aim of this work was to append foreign terms to Terminologia by using similarity-matching algorithm between its Latin terms and those from Nomina. METHODS: A semi-automatic matching of Latin terms from Terminologia with those of Nomina was performed using a string-to-string distance algorithm and manual assessment. We used a French-Latin version of Nomina together with Terminologia and we suggested French terms for Terminologia. Coverage was evaluated by the number of exact and approximate matches. A target of 78% was set due to the higher number of terms in Terminologia compared to Nomina. Relevance was estimated by manually comparing the meanings of the English and French terms related to the same Latin term. The question was whether they refer to the same anatomical structure. RESULTS: Exact or approximate matches were found for 5982 terms (76.5%) of Terminologia. Our results indicated that more than 75% of the terms from Terminologia came from Nomina, most of them were left unchanged and all were used with the same meaning. CONCLUSION: This method produces relevant results, reaching our 78% target. The method is based only on Latin terms and can be used for other languages. We consider this work as a starting point for adding terms to other knowledge sources, such as the foundational model of anatomy or the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).

Algorithms↗

PubMed1993

The relation of maternal language to variation in rate and style of language acquisition.

The main thrust of this paper is to question whether in earlier studies the 'motherese hypothesis' has been adequately tested. The present study first explores concurrent relations between maternal and child language at an early age, using the Snyder, Bates & Bretherton (1981) questionnaire to assess vocabulary at 1;1. With a large sample of 45 subjects, videotaped at 1;1 and 1;8, it was possible to analyse earlier talkers separately from later talkers. The results indicate pre-existing differences between the mothers of earlier and later talkers as early as 1;1--some 5 months before other studies have examined the possible facilitative effects of 'motherese'. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, when the sample was divided according to stylistic preference at 1;8, several associations between maternal language at 1;1 and MLU at 1;8 emerged for the non-expressive group which were non-existent for the expressive group. These results imply that earlier studies may have been looking for the effectiveness of maternal input too late. Moreover, it may continue to be difficult to demonstrate consistent effects of child-directed speech as long as researchers continue to ignore individual differences in style of language acquisition.

Age Factors↗

PubMed1990

The identification of language impairment in the selection of specifically language-impaired subjects.

This review focused on the methods used to identify language impairment in specifically language-impaired subjects participating in 72 research studies that were described in four journals from 1983 to 1988. The single most frequent source of information used in the identification process was found to be test data. There was, however, considerable variability and, often, a lack of clarity regarding the specific number and identity of tests used. More specific findings on test use indicated that researchers routinely assessed both expressive and receptive language and that they used incomplete tests. When test scores used in identification and selection were examined, there was a wide range of score types, and age-equivalent scores were by far the most common and often the only type of score utilized. Conclusions are drawn regarding the impact of these findings on the interpretation and generalizability of this research literature.

Child↗

PubMed1992

Delay versus deviance in the language acquisition of language-impaired children.

To investigate the issue of delay versus deviance in the language acquisition of language-impaired (LI) children, the order of acquisition of a set of linguistic structures and the relationship obtaining between one structure and another were examined in comprehension and production over a 5-year period in a group of LI and language-matched normal children. The results demonstrated a marked similarity between groups, both in the point at which mastery of individual structures was achieved and in the overall patterns of acquisition demonstrated. These data suggest that LI children are constructing grammars based on the same rules and principles as those of linguistically normal control subjects, and that their linguistic impairments may be principally processing, not representational, in nature.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed1994

Social valence in children with specific language impairment during imitation-based and conversation-based language intervention.

This study investigated the level of social valence and type of social behaviors expressed in 15 children with specific language impairment as they engaged in typical language intervention activities during conversation-based and imitation-based language programs. These programs were both applied to each child over a period of several weeks. Videotapes of treatment sessions were analyzed for the presence of five verbal and 11 nonverbal behaviors selected to measure social valence. In addition, the child's level of social valence was scored on a three-point rating scale. The results showed that although both types of treatments were predominantly associated with positive social valence ratings and a high frequency of smiling, laughing, and engagement in the activities, a significantly higher number of these positive ratings and behaviors were noted within conversation-based treatment. In contrast, although negative social valence ratings and expressions of boredom or dislike were very rare, these were observed more frequently under imitation-based treatment. There was a significantly higher rate of verbal initiations in the conversation-based treatment, and a significantly higher rate of quiet, passive participation in the imitation-based treatment. The findings are discussed in relation to treatment selection and viable strategies for assessing treatment acceptability in children.

Child Language↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Teaching speech and language therapists in Sri Lanka: issues in curriculum, culture and language.

This paper draws on the experiences of the authors in designing and teaching a new course to educate speech and language therapists in Sri Lanka. This was the first speech and language therapist course in the country and was the result of collaboration between two universities, one in the UK and one in Sri Lanka. Rather than replicating established programmes elsewhere it was more appropriate to design a new course, suited to providing a comprehensive model of service, encompassing both social and medical approaches to rehabilitation. Issues about developing teaching and learning approaches to match pre-existing knowledge and experience of both staff and students are addressed. The particular ways of designing the programme to take account of cultural and language aspects of the Sri Lankan context are discussed.

Culture↗

PubMedDate not supplied

English language learners who struggle with reading: language acquisition or LD?

We review empirical research on English language learners (ELLs) who struggle with reading and who may have learning disabilities (LD). We sought to determine research indicators that can help us better differentiate between ELLs who struggle to acquire literacy because of their limited proficiency in English and ELLs who have actual LD. We conclude that more research is warranted to further elucidate the strengths and learning needs of subgroups of underachieving ELLs, to help us determine who should qualify for special education, and to clarify why some ELLs who do not have LD still struggle with language and literacy acquisition. Future research should account for the complexities involved in becoming literate in another language and focus more on cultural and contextual factors that affect student achievement.

Achievement↗

PubMed2006

Aspects of language in children with ADHD: applying functional analyses to explore language use.

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that are supplied by 11 children diagnosed with ADHD and 11 typically developing children. Comparisons of multiple variables most often show differences in use between the groups. Closer examination of these differences shows that relative to the controls, the ADHD group uses fewer strategies of textual organization and more avoidance, tangential, and unrelated meanings and more abandoned utterances and spelling and punctuation errors. Clinical implications suggest that careful linguistic analysis of spoken and written language of children with ADHD cannot only identify the linguistic resources they use within everyday contexts but may also indicate areas where intervention may be beneficial.

Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity↗

PubMed2001

Phonological processing, language, and literacy: a comparison of children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss and those with specific language impairment.

Phonological skills, language ability, and literacy scores were compared for four groups: 19 children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNH), 20 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 20 controls matched on chronological age to the SNH group (CA), and 15 controls matched on receptive vocabulary level to a subset of the SLI group (CB). In common with the SLI group, mean scores of children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were significantly poorer on tests of phonological short-term memory, phonological discrimination, and phonological awareness than CA controls. No differences between group means were observed in SNH and CA control groups on vocabulary, digit and sentence recall, sentence comprehension, and literacy scores. However, there was considerable individual variation within the SNH group. Nearly 50% of the SNH group showed phonological impairment associated with poorer expressive and receptive vocabulary and higher hearing thresholds than remaining children without phonological impairment. Nonword repetition deficits were observed in SNH subgroups with and without phonological impairment and were of a similar magnitude to those observed in children with SLI. Indeed, poorer repetition in children with SLI could only be differentiated from children with SNH on phonologically complex nonwords. Overall, findings suggested major problems in nonword repetition and phonological impairment occurred without clinically significant deficits in wider language and literacy abilities in children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Implications for theories of SLI are discussed.

Auditory Threshold↗

PubMed1992

Sedation and topical anesthetics in audiology and speech-language pathology. Ad Hoc Committee on Advances in Clinical Practice. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

Audiologists and speech-language pathologists who participate in or perform procedures on patients who have been medicated for sedation or topical anesthesia should appreciate the complex factors which may expose their patients to risk or harm. Administration of medications to achieve a desired patient state is a medical procedure requiring physician or dentist prescription, physician or dentist approval on the conditions of administration and monitoring, and physician or dentist availability for provision of emergency care that may be required. For these reasons, audiologists and speech-language pathologists should address issues of scope of practice as defined by state licensing boards and institutional regulatory committees, professional liability, and patient and practitioner safety before engaging in procedures on individuals medicated for sedation or topical anesthesia. These issues should be defined in specific, written protocols that the audiologist and speech-language pathologist develop in collaboration with physicians, dentists, and other medical professionals who are responsible for patient care. The protocols should specify responsibility for each aspect of care and limit procedures to professional settings with immediate access to emergency medical care. In all instances, both in development of written protocols and in actual professional practice, the comfort and safety of the patient must be paramount.

Administration, Topical↗

PubMed1995

Associating semantic grammars with the SNOMED: processing medical language and representing clinical facts into a language-independent frame.

We describe one approach for natural language processing of medical texts that associates a semantic grammar with the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine). Our research hypothesis is that the combination of the nomenclature's declarative knowledge with a formal grammar would create a scientific sublanguage embedded with medical knowledge that could be used for analyzing and formatting medical texts. This combination permitted the abstraction of templates we call "semantic patterns." These patterns represent both linguistic and medical knowledge, packed into a hybrid information format. We analyzed manually case reports described in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1985 to 1988 and extracted empirically a semantic grammar. Over 2,000 sentences were analyzed. About 160 structural semantic patterns were abstracted and included in the database of one parser. We tested the parser using reports from 1989 to 1990. Results show that this approach is efficient for processing, indexing, and structuring diverse parts of case reports narrative. The analyzed medical sentences are structured into a language-independent semantic frame format. We conclude that the association of semantic grammars with the SNOMED enabled the construction of a formal system for analysis and representation of clinical facts. The transformation of the structured information from its frame format into other representational schemes, like conceptual graphs, is straightforward. Another application includes the use of the formatted language-independent frame for telegraphic English-Japanese translations of medical sentences.

Language↗

PubMed2006

Music-to-language transfer effect: may melodic ability improve learning of tonal languages by native nontonal speakers?

In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tones are processed by native listeners as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. This study aims at verifying if, in nontonal languages speakers, the discrimination of lexical Mandarin tones varies in function of the melodic ability. Forty-six students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic Mandarin words and invited to perform a same-different task trying to identify whether the variation were phonological or tonal. Main results show that subjects perform significantly better in identifying phonological variations rather than tonal ones and interestingly, the group with a high melodic ability (assessed by Wing subtest 3) shows a better performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations.

Adult↗

PubMed1988

Expressive language recovery in aphasia using the Shewan Spontaneous Language Analysis (SSLA) system.

The oral expressive language of a group of aphasic subjects was measured on two occasions approximately one year apart to determine what changes took place during this period and whether these changes were significant. The SSLA system was used to evaluate the aphasic language samples obtained from a picture description task. Positive changes toward normal language functioning occurred for several variables. Type of aphasia affected the outcome of several variables. The rank ordering of aphasia types from most to least impaired was similar across these variables, thereby suggesting similar outcome patterns. Initial severity of aphasia also influenced the outcome of several SSLA variables. However, the degree of concordance of the severity groups across variables was not statistically significant. Treatment had a positive effect on the outcome of only one SSLA variable. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Grammatical language impairment and the specificity of cognitive domains: relations between auditory and language abilities.

Grammatical-specific language impairment (G-SLI) in children, arguably, provides evidence for the existence of a specialised grammatical sub-system in the brain, necessary for normal language development. Some researchers challenge this, claiming that domain-general, low-level auditory deficits, particular to rapid processing, cause phonological deficits and thereby SLI. We investigate this possibility by testing the auditory discrimination abilities of G-SLI children for speech and non-speech sounds, at varying presentation rates, and controlling for the effects of age and language on performance. For non-speech formant transitions, 69% of the G-SLI children showed normal auditory processing, whereas for the same acoustic information in speech, only 31% did so. For rapidly presented tones, 46% of the G-SLI children performed normally. Auditory performance with speech and non-speech sounds differentiated the G-SLI children from their age-matched controls, whereas speed of processing did not. The G-SLI children evinced no relationship between their auditory and phonological/grammatical abilities. We found no consistent evidence that a deficit in processing rapid acoustic information causes or maintains G-SLI. The findings, from at least those G-SLI children who do not exhibit any auditory deficits, provide further evidence supporting the existence of a primary domain-specific deficit underlying G-SLI.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production.

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism.

Cognition↗

PubMed2005

Moving ahead in language: observations on a report of precocious language development in 3-4 year old children with spinal muscular atrophy type II.

Benony and Benony in a recent issue of this Journal have presented new data on the precocity of language acquisition in children with type II spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), at age 36-47 months. They refer to our interim report of advanced early language development in these motor-impaired children, which covers the age period 18-35 months. Here, we provide more details of our findings and discuss them in relation to their report and our theory of the role of the procedural system in language learning.

Child, Preschool↗