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PubMed2005

Complex syntax acquisition: a longitudinal case study of a child with specific language impairment.

Although there is extensive documentation of the morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI), few studies have reported on complex syntax acquisition in children with SLI. This case study examined the development of complex syntax in a child with SLI between 3 and 7 years. Twelve conversational samples were analysed to describe emergence of complex syntax types, proportional use of complex syntax, and complex syntax production errors. Earliest emerging complex syntax types were catenatives and let's clauses, not always considered true complex syntax, as well as simple infinitives. These three types accounted for 88% of complex syntax tokens through age 4;8 (MLU = 3.12). A diverse range of complex syntax types was produced consistently at age 5;9 (MLU = 4.27), including wh clausal complements, relative clauses, and full propositional clauses. Production errors on complex syntax included omissions of infinitival to, omissions of wh pronouns in wh clausal complements, omissions of obligatory relative markers, and an omission of a complementizer. Production errors continued to be prevalent even in the last language sample at 7;10 (MLU = 5.46). Documentation of complex syntax development in children with SLI is critical to the clarification of linguistic deficiencies that characterize specific language impairment.

Child↗

PubMed2006

Comparison of standardized assessments for cognitive and receptive communication skills in young children with complex communication needs.

This study compared estimates of receptive language development for children with complex communication needs to estimates of related skill domains. Subscores of the Battelle Developmental Inventory were compared with each other and the MacArthur Communication Developmental Inventory for 41 children with severe expressive impairments over a period of 18 months, beginning at ages 12-24 months. Across all ages studied, children with severe expressive impairments had better receptive language scores than expected for either their cognitive or overall developmental age equivalence scores. While receptive language measures were correlated with each other and age, scores for receptive language skills on the MacArthur were consistently more stringent than for the Battelle for this population. Implications for clinical application of these measures for children with expressive impairments are discussed.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1994

The Children's Test of Nonword Repetition: a test of phonological working memory.

This article presents findings from the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep). Normative data based on its administration to over 600 children aged between four and nine years are reported. Close developmental links are established between CNRep scores and vocabulary, reading, and comprehensive skills in children during the early school years. The links between nonword repetition and language skills are shown to be consistently higher and more specific than those obtained between language skills and another simple verbal task with a significant phonological memory component, auditory digit span. The psychological mechanisms underpinning these distinctive developmental relationships between nonword repetition and language development are considered.

Case-Control Studies↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Early effects of traumatic brain injury on young children's language performance: a preliminary linguistic analysis.

Language skills undergo rapid development during the early childhood years, so that by the time children start school they are competent communicators with well established syntactic, semantic and pragmatic abilities for their age. Little is known about the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on the acquisition of these language skills during the early childhood years. This study used a prospective, cross-sectional design to compare the language abilities of young children following their head injury. Fifteen brain injured children, aged between 4-6 years, were divided into three injury groups depending on severity of injury, i.e. mild, moderate and severe, and compared with a matched community control group. They were assessed within 3 months of sustaining their injury on a range of expressive and receptive language tests, and free speech conversation samples, which were analysed pragmatically and syntactically. Results indicated that the severe group performed most poorly on language tasks. It is suggested that linguistic evaluation is an important component of follow up at least for the severe head injured population.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Conversation versus narration in pre-school children with language impairment.

The study focuses on two elicitation methods for language sampling in children with language impairment: conversation and narration. It has been noted in other studies on different clinical groups that language elicited in different speaking contexts varies in aspects such as MLU, fluency and syntactic complexity. The purpose of this study was to compare genre effects on different aspects of language production in a group of pre-school children with language impairment. The results show that there are differences in language production during conversation compared with narration. Intelligibility and fluency were found to be higher in conversation than in narration, whereas MLU in words was higher in narration. The narrative task elicited more phrasal expansions and grammatical morphemes per utterance than the conversation. However, the children used more complex verb forms in conversation than in narration. The results are discussed in relation to recent research.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Investigating parental views of involvement in pre-school speech and language therapy.

Today, speech and language therapists working with the pre-school population routinely involve parents in their children's treatment programmes. Also, there is increasing recognition of the importance of considering client and carer views in evaluating services. Thus, in both clinical and research terms, the role of parents is key. This paper reports an aspect of a study that investigated parents' views and perceptions of their pre-school children's speech and language difficulties and the speech and language therapy (SLT) they received. The methodology of the study was qualitative and data were collected from the parents of 16 pre-school children, using in-depth interviews. The parents' perceptions could be characterized as a process with three phases. On the whole, parents viewed their involvement in SLT positively but crucially, the interviews highlighted discrepancies between therapists' and parents' perceptions of the therapy process. The study demonstrates that when parents' views are considered, a fuller understanding of the effectiveness and acceptability of treatment can emerge.

Attitude to Health↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Non-word repetition and language development in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Non-word repetition has previously been found to correlate with language outcomes both in children who are language impaired and in those who are developing normally. This paper concerns a group of children identified as having specific language impairment (SLI) and follows the methods of Adams and Gathercole (2000) by taking children with the highest and the lowest non-word repetition scores at age 11. These children's language and literacy abilities were then compared. Despite the fact that high and low scorers were matched on Performance IQ tasks (Block Design and Picture Completion), all linguistic measures except for vocabulary assessments showed significant differences between the groups. The fact that these differences were present despite block design scores being identical for the two groups suggests that more than a general working memory deficit underlies the language difficulties. Furthermore, significant differences were noted on a digit-span task requiring processing and production of number words. A specific phonological memory difficulty may therefore be present over and above a subtle but more general processing limitation. The implications for SLI theory and practice are discussed.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Different school placements following language unit attendance: which factors affect language outcome?

The study compared the outcomes of two groups of children who were attending language unit provision at 7 years of age. Of 242 children in the original study, 62 (28%) transferred to mainstream school placements at age 8 years. These children were then closely matched to children still attending language unit provision at this age using measures of non-verbal IQ, expression and comprehension. These two groups of children were compared on outcome at 11 years in the areas of language skill, non-verbal IQ and social behaviour. Teacher/speech-language therapist opinions of placement were also examined as factors affecting outcome. Results show that children who moved to mainstream provision at 8 years were more likely to be attending mainstream at 11 years, although the majority received extra support. No further differences were evident in outcome according to placement type. However, there was a main effect of teacher/therapist opinion on outcome--children whose teachers were not entirely happy with the 8-year placement performed more poorly at 11 years on language measures. There were no differences on any other measures. The findings suggest that follow-on placements for children attending language units need to be more closely in line with teacher's opinions and that more flexibility needs to be evident in school placement policy in order that appropriate educational settings can be arranged.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Verbs of placement in Swedish children with SLI.

This study investigated lexical aspects of verb knowledge in Swedish children with specific language impairment (SLI). The type of verbs studied were those of placement, a semantic area with a language-specific differentiation in Swedish. It was hypothesized that owing to their cross-linguistic uncommonness, these verbs cause difficulties for children with SLI, that these problems are more marked in production than in comprehension, and that children with SLI show less change over time than controls. Ten children with SLI and 10 language-matched controls participated in an acting-out task testing the comprehension and production of four different verbs of placement. The children were tested on two occasions, with a 6-month interval. The groups did not differ in their performance on the comprehension task at either testing. In production, the children with SLI had significantly more difficulties in choosing the correct verb than the controls at the second testing. The controls performed significantly better on production at the second testing than at the first, whereas the children with SLI did not enhance their performance between testings. This indicates that children with SLI have lexical problems and that these problems do not diminish with time. The results are related to the results from studies of second-language learners of Swedish who often have difficulties in the usage of these verbs. The results are also related to the results from studies of the corresponding semantic field in English- and Dutch-speaking children with SLI. The comparisons show some interesting differences, depending on the type of learner and the language learned. The approach adopted seems promising. Studies of lexical specificity in children with SLI would give interesting information, useful both for the development of clinical assessment instruments and for our understanding of lexical acquisition in these children.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Lexical learning skills in young children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Twenty-eight children with specific language impairment (SLI) aged 4;4-5;10, and 28 children with normal language (NL) aged 2;4-3;7 were exposed to four novel verbs, and four novel nouns in eight naturalistic play sessions, over 4 weeks. Spontaneous utterances of the novel lexical items in each of the training sessions were recorded and formed the basis of the analyses. The results of the spontaneous production data (across all sessions) revealed that children with NL produced more novel verbs than children with SLI, with a trend for children with SLI to produce more novel nouns. Importantly, children with SLI learned novel verbs at a slower rate than children with NL. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of SLI with particular reference to the SLI critical mass hypothesis.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

'I never even gave it a second thought': PGCE students' attitudes towards the inclusion of children with speech and language impairments.

Approximately 7% of young school-aged children have specific language impairments. Many such children are now being educated in mainstream settings. However, there is a dearth of up-to-date and valid research that considers UK (student) teachers' attitudes towards such children. This study aimed to investigate trainee teachers' attitudes towards teaching children with speech and language impairments, to investigate the reported effects of those attitudes on participants' acceptance of teaching such children, and to consider any implications for speech and language therapy (SLT) services and inclusive education. Nineteen trainee teachers (PGCE students) from a university in the North West of England took part in semistructured group interviews. The data were transcribed and analysed qualitatively, and recurrent themes identified. A range of attitudes was expressed, and six major themes were identified from the data. Participants discussed concerns about the resources and knowledge they considered necessary to support fully children with specific language impairments. There was some differentiation of attitudes related to the types of disability that a child may have and the subject being taught. Much of the discussion was about disabilities in general rather than specific to speech and language impairments. Many of the participants reflected on their own previous experiences to inform their opinions. Although many of the participants expressed positive attitudes, some had concerns about workload and at least one was openly hostile to the idea of teaching children with disabilities within mainstream settings. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to previous research, the quantitative data obtained in this project, SLT services and the increases in the inclusion of children with specific language impairments into mainstream educational settings.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Developmental perspectives on bilingual Swedish-Arabic children with and without language impairment: a longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND: There is a need for studies on bilingual language acquisition in combination with language impairment (LI). The speech and language clinician must have tools to differentiate between problems depending on inadequate exposure to a language and problems depending on a LI. Another important issue is the pace of bilingual language acquisition relative to the severity of LI. AIMS: To investigate grammatical development over 12 months in both languages in 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children with severe LI and 10 Swedish-Arabic pre-school children without LI. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The children were matched for age, gender, exposure to Swedish dialect, and exposure to Arabic dialect. The developmental hierarchy predicted by Processability Theory was used in tests in both Swedish and Arabic. Processability Theory was used as a yardstick to measure grammatical development in both languages. OUTCOME & RESULTS: Bilingual children, both with and without LI, developed grammatical structures in Swedish and Arabic in the same implicational way. Children with severe LI could develop two languages, although the pace of development was much slower in both languages. Bilingual children with severe LI were also more vulnerable to limited exposure of both their languages. CONCLUSIONS: A developmental perspective is important to understand the nature of LI in bilingual children. The results also have implications for the assessment of language development in bilingual children with severe LI, since a hardly perceptible development over time is observed.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: effects of input rate and phonological working memory.

BACKGROUND: Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit sentence comprehension difficulties. In some instances, these difficulties appear to be related to poor linguistic knowledge and, in other instances, to inferior general processing abilities. Two processing deficiencies evidenced by these children include reduced linguistic processing speed and diminished phonological working memory (PWM) capacity. While providing children with SLI a slower input rate appears to facilitate their immediate (real-time) processing of language; it is not known whether such a manipulation might also promote better offline (conventional) sentence comprehension. Complicating the potential benefits of a slower input rate on these children's offline comprehension is that a slower input rate might negatively interact with their PWM deficit. That is, a slower presentation rate may have the unintended consequence of placing too great a temporal burden on these children's vulnerable PWM system, thereby leading to even poorer comprehension. That is, a slower input rate presumably requires the listener to store previously processed information for a longer period while new, incoming material is being processed. AIMS: To investigate the interaction of input rate and PWM capacity on the sentence comprehension of children with SLI. It was hypothesized that if a slower input rate negatively affects the PWM functioning of children with SLI, these children would comprehend significantly fewer sentences presented at a slower rate versus sentences presented at a normal rate. It was also hypothesized that input rate should have no differential effect on the typically developing control children. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A group of 12 school-age children with SLI, a group of 12 age-matched children (CA), and a group of 12 receptive syntax-matched (RS) children (all with normal-range non-verbal IQ and hearing) completed a conventional picture-pointing sentence comprehension task. Sentences were presented at a normal speaking rate and a slower rate (25% time expanded). Children also completed a non-word repetition task, which served as an index of PWM capacity. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Results of the PWM task revealed that the children with SLI repeated fewer three- and four-syllable non-words than both the CA and RS children, suggesting they had reduced PWM capacity. On the sentence comprehension task, a significant group by input rate interaction emerged. The children with SLI yielded significantly poorer comprehension of normal-rate sentences compared with both the CA and RS children. Whereas input rate had no differential effect on CA and RS children's comprehension, the comprehension of the children with SLI improved to the level of RS children in the slow-rate condition. Correlational analyses showed no significant association between PWM and sentence comprehension in either rate condition for any of the groups. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these findings suggest that the simple manipulation of altering speaking rate to children with SLI indeed can facilitate sentence comprehension, with no apparent detrimental effect on the operations of their PWM system.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Home environments of 10-month-old infants selected by the WILSTAAR screen for pre-language difficulties.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The Ward Infant Language Screening Test, Assessment, Acceleration and Remediation (WILSTAAR) comprises a programme for identifying and helping 8-10-month-old infants showing early signs of language and communication difficulty. The study addresses one of the queries raised by critics of the programme by providing evidence about the backgrounds and home environments of infants who fail the WILSTAAR screening assessment. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Thirty 10-month-old infants who failed the screen ('at-risk' infants) and 30 gender- and age-matched infants who passed the screen ('not-at-risk' infants) were visited at home by a trained observer who collected information about the infants' physical and social environment and families' demographic features. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Parents of both groups were well educated, in stable relationships, and had no evidence of social or economic disadvantage. Measures of ambient sound level and television exposure did not support the hypothesis that the at-risk infants' environments involved high levels of noise. However, observations of spontaneous behaviour and a standardized Mother-Infant Play Task identified low amounts of social interaction in at-risk cases. During the play task, mothers of at-risk infants spent twice as much time without interacting with their infants. At-risk infants babbled one-third less than not-at-risk infants during 150-min observations of spontaneous behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: The findings point to deficiencies in social interaction and communication, involving both infant and parental contributions, as maintaining the infants' difficulties at this age. The core of the WILSTAAR intervention, of encouraging social communication between parents and infants, is not complex and does not need to be confined to at-risk cases. How this is best accomplished in the general community, and whether it should be included in national schemes such as Sure Start in the UK, are important topics for practitioners and policy-makers.

Attention↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Effects of input rate and age on the real-time language processing of children with specific language impairment.

BACKGROUND: School-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit slower real-time (i.e. immediate) language processing relative to same-age peers. The offline sentence comprehension of children with SLI can be improved when the input is slowed down. Although this finding suggests that a slower input delivery facilitates these children's language processing, such an interpretation is premature, as there are no data directly addressing the issue. Additionally, while typically developing (TD) children demonstrate age-related improvements in language processing (i.e. they become faster processors), it is unclear whether children with SLI show the same developmental improvement. AIMS: It was investigated whether a reduced input rate can enhance the online language processing of children with SLI. If it does, their reaction time (RT) for recognizing words embedded in sentences delivered at a slow rate should be faster relative to words in normal- and fast-rate sentences. For TD children, RT should be unaffected by rate manipulation, as their language-processing system is sufficiently robust to handle such a simple input manipulation. A secondary aim was to provide preliminary data on the developmental course of language processing proficiency in children with SLI. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Twenty school-age children with SLI and 20 age-matched TD children completed a word recognition RT task. Children monitored simple sentences for a target word and made a timed response immediately upon recognizing the target. Sentences were presented at 'normal', 'slow' and 'fast' speaking rates. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: There was a significant group by input rate interaction. Children with SLI, relative to TD peers, yielded significantly slower RT for normal- and fast-rate sentences, but faster RT for slow-rate sentences. Within-group analyses showed the children with SLI produced the fastest RT for slow-rate sentences and the slowest RT for fast-rate sentences. The TD children showed the opposite response pattern: the fastest RT for fast-rate sentences and the slowest RT for slow-rate sentences. Age also had a significant effect. Regardless of language status, older children produced faster RT than younger children. Interestingly, even the oldest children with SLI still demonstrated significantly slower RT than the youngest TD children. CONCLUSIONS: The real-time language processing of children with SLI can be facilitated when the material is presented at a slower rate. A slower rate apparently allows these children time to allocate their attentional resources more effectively to the various processing operations supporting comprehension. Additionally, the language proficiency of children with SLI improves with age. However, older children with SLI are still slower than their youngest TD peers, suggesting that the language-processing apparatus of children with SLI operates even more inefficiently than what their receptive language knowledge might otherwise predict.

Age Factors↗

PubMedDate not supplied

'Thinking for two': a case study of speech and language therapists working through assistants.

BACKGROUND: Many speech and language therapists (SLTs) in the UK work with speech and language therapy assistants, and the numbers of SLT assistants is expected to grow. There has been very little empirical investigation of how SLTs feel about this situation or the effect on working practices of working indirectly. AIMS: To investigate SLTs' opinions on working with SLT assistants in a small-scale research case study. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: The study design was a case study of five SLTs delivering intervention within a research intervention project. Prepared questionnaire and formal interview techniques were used to elicit opinions on working through assistants, and a content analysis was performed. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Although respondents could see value in working through assistants, they stressed the time required to do so and the difficulties of adapting and updating therapy plans when working indirectly. CONCLUSIONS: The study suggests a variety of factors that have to be carefully managed if SLTs are to work competently through assistants.

Allied Health Personnel↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Spatio-visual memory of children with specific language impairment: evidence for generalized processing problems.

BACKGROUND: Children with Specific language Impairment (SLI) have problems with verbal memory, particularly with tasks that have more processing demands. They also have slower speeds of responding for some tasks. AIMS: To identify the extent to which young children with SLI would differ in performance from age-matched non-impaired children on a set of spatio-visual memory tasks. It was predicted that if memory limitations of children with SLI extend beyond the verbal domain to other domains, their performance would be significantly poorer on the spatio-visual tasks than that of the comparison group. It was also predicted that they would be slower in responding. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Six spatio-visual tasks were used to compare the performance of 21 children with SLI, with a mean age of 54.1 months, and 21 age-matched non-impaired children. The tasks ranged in difficulty from simple recall to a search-based working memory task. All tasks were administered though a laptop computer and responses were non-verbal using a touch screen. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The children with SLI were not significantly slower than the comparison group. However, they were significantly less accurate than the comparison group in recalling patterns, but not in recalling locations. The accuracy for both groups was lower on spatial recall than on pattern recall. The children with SLI were also significantly less able to learn to associate a particular pattern with a particular location, and to have a shorter spatial span. However, on a spatial search task testing working memory, the groups did not differ significantly. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that the memory limitations of children with SLI are not restricted to verbal memory, and this fact has implications for its aetiology. Intervention programmes for young children with SLI need to extend beyond language in order to help them develop strategies for processing information in different situations.

Association↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Elicited and spontaneous communicative functions and stability of conversational measures with children who have pragmatic language impairments.

BACKGROUND: The preliminary phase of a project aimed at establishing appropriate outcome measures for intervention with children who have pragmatic language impairments (PLI) is reported. Assessment methods for children with PLI are considered in the context of developing outcome measures for intervention studies. Communicative function assessments in elicitation and conversational contexts are compared. The stability of measures derived from conversational profiling is also considered. AIMS: To investigate the utility of an elicited communicative function assessment in discriminating the pragmatic characteristics of children with PLI and to compare this method to conversational profiling. An additional aim was to estimate the degree of variation on conversational indices derived from interactions with children with PLI. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Fifteen children with PLI (mean age 9; 5 years) and an age-matched control group were assessed on two occasions on a new communicative function elicitation task and on a conversation task. A checklist of communicative functions was employed in analysing the elicitation and the conversation tasks. An analysis of conversation was carried out to derive conversational indices such as verbosity and meshing. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The elicitation task failed to discriminate between the PLI and control groups and showed a strong ceiling effect. Significant between-group differences were found for both communicative function in conversation measures and on conversational indices. The variation in conversation indices is relatively small compared with the baseline measures. CONCLUSIONS: A more representative picture of communicative function ability arises from unstructured tasks rather than from structured elicitation tasks for the age group of children with PLI. The elicitation procedure outlined in this paper might be better suited to a younger age group. Differences between communicative function performance on elicitation and conversation situations suggest a strong effect of context on the pragmatic performance of children with PLI. The conversational indices reported show sufficient stability to be employed in an outcome measure provided the minor variations indicated are factored into estimates of change.

Assertiveness↗