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PubMed2004

The birth of new languages in contemporary Europe.

The birth of a language is a historical process, which develops through almost six stages corresponding to six main properties (genetic distance, geographical isolation, adoption of a writing system, elaboration of a literary koine, national consciousness, official status), which are specific to Western civilization and limited to our concern, i.e. the languages in contemporary Europe. The two last properties are the most important and conclusive in achieving the full status of language in contrast with dialect, speech, idiom, vernacular and so on. Consequently, in this perspective the birth of a language can be stated when its use is felt as a token of national identity and its official status is recognized by politic power. The history of some interesting cases during the 20th century, such as Luxemburgish, Feroese and Macedonian will throw a light on the possible future scenario of the languages of the Former Yugoslavia. Other disputed, although not so dramatic cases, like Sardinian, Aranese, Moldavian and Ruthenian, are dealt with together with recurrent topics on minority languages. The conclusion is that, unlike the worldwide tendency, the number of languages will probably increase within the greater European Union in the course of the 21st century.

Anthropology, Cultural↗

PubMed2004

Language and cultural contacts among Yukatekan Mayans.

The Yukatekan branch of the Maya language family, spread across the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, northern Guatemala, and Belize, began to diversify approximately 1,000 years ago. Today it has four branches: Mopan Maya, Itzaj Maya, Lakantun Maya and Yukatek Maya proper, which have widely varying language statuses. Lakantun and Itzaj Maya are seriously threatened, while Mopan appears to have a stable or growing population of approximately 10,000 speakers and Yukatek has a very large number of speakers, perhaps 750,000. However, even many Yukateks believe that their language is threatened and that shift to Spanish is underway. During the past millennia there has been a series of contacts involving migration, trade, warfare, and flight among the different branches, as well as with other Mayan languages and with the Spanish. This paper examines a variety of different kinds of contact, and how the different language varieties were involved and affected. One goal of the paper is to better understand how the dynamics of inter-cultural contacts affects language practices resulting in very different language statuses and ideologies.

Anthropology, Cultural↗

PubMed1991

The six languages of social work.

This article describes the six languages that scientifically minded and practice-competent social workers need to be fluent in: the lay language of the client, the abstract language of the theorist, the empirical and often quantitative language of the researcher, the categorical language of the information scientist, the technical terminology or jargon used by helping professionals, and the preferential language that conveys values. It is the thesis of this article that social workers need multilingual and translingual proficiency in moving rapidly back and forth among these languages for maximum effectiveness and humane service.

Humans↗

PubMed1995

[Speech perception test in Italian language for profoundly deaf children].

Speech perception tests are an important part of procedures for diagnosing pre-verbal hearing loss. Merely establishing a child's hearing threshold with and without a hearing aid is not sufficient to ensure an adequate evaluation with a view to selecting cases suitable for cochlear implants because it fails to indicate the real benefit obtained from using a conventional hearing aid reliably. Speech perception tests have proved useful not only for patient selection, but also for subsequent evaluation of the efficacy of new hearing aids, such as tactile devices and cochlear implants. In clinical practice, the tests most commonly adopted with small children are: The Auditory Comprehension Test (ACT), Discrimination after Training (DAT), Monosyllable, Trochee, Spondee tests (MTS), Glendonald Auditory Screening Priocedure (GASP), Early Speech Perception Test (ESP), Rather than considering specific results achieved in individual cases, reference is generally made to the four speech perception classes proposed by Moog and Geers of the CID of St. Louis. The purpose of this classification, made on the results obtained with suitably differentiated tests according to the child's age and language ability, is to detect differences in perception of a spoken message in ideal listening conditions. To date, no italian language speech perception test has been designed to establish the assessment of speech perception level in children with profound hearing impairment. We attempted, therefore, to adapt the existing English tests to the Italian language taking into consideration the differences between the two languages. Our attention focused on the ESP test since it can be applied to even very small children (2 years old). The ESP is proposed in a standard version for hearing-impaired children over the age of 6 years and in a simplified version for younger children. The rationale we used for selecting Italian words reflect the rationale established for the original version, but the choice of single words follows different criteria from the original version. In fact, the two languages differ in important linguistic features so that the test can not be not adapted to the Italian language by simply translating the words involved. As currently there is no children's language dictionary in Italian arranged according to age bracket, we chose words used in children and in pre-school reading material.

Child↗

PubMed1994

Language abilities following prematurity, periventricular brain injury, and cerebral palsy.

This study compares language abilities in three groups of children who were born prematurely: children with bilateral spastic cerebral palsy associated with perinatal injury to the periventricular white matter of the brain; a group with similar brain injury but no motor impairment; and a group of controls with no brain injuries. Six boys in each group were 36 to 39 months of age at the time of the study. All achieved a standard score above 80 on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities at the same age. Language samples, generated during parent-child interaction, were analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System. The size and diversity of the lexicon was assessed using types and tokens per minute. Morpho-syntactic skills were assessed using number of grammatical morphemes, mean length of utterance and the Index of Productive Syntax. Verbal productivity was assessed using number of utterances per minute. No significant differences were observed among any of the groups on any measure. Measures of the lexicon and morpho-syntactic skills were highly correlated with the scores on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities. The data demonstrated that specific language impairments were not associated with cerebral palsy or brain injury after prematurity at this early stage of language development. However, individual children within each of the groups had delays in skill attainment that warranted language intervention.

Brain↗

PubMed1979

The effects of chronic middle ear effusion on speech and language development -- a descriptive study.

In this study, the speech and language skills of children with histories of chronic middle ear effusion were analyzed. Forty-seven children between the ages of one year eleven months and five years five months were given a battery of speech and language tests in the course of a diagnostic evaluation. All the children had been referred to speech pathology by a physician because of a suspected communication disorder. All subjects had histories of three or more episodes of middle era effusion, with the first episode occurring prior to 18 months of age. All medical records were checked and in-depth case histories were obtained in order to rule out other possible complicating factors that might have contributed to a speech and language delay. The results of this study revealed essentially age-appropriate receptive language skills in this group of children. Expressive language and articulatory skills were significantly below chronological age level expectation, indicating the possible serious effects of chronic middle ear effusion on speech and language development.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed2005

Automatic processing of multilingual medical terminology: applications to thesaurus enrichment and cross-language information retrieval.

OBJECTIVES: We present in this article experiments on multi-language information extraction and access in the medical domain. For such applications, multilingual terminology plays a crucial role when working on specialized languages and specific domains. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We propose firstly a method for enriching multilingual thesauri which extracts new terms from parallel corpora, and secondly, a new approach for bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora, which uses a bilingual thesaurus as a pivot. We illustrate their use in multi-language information retrieval (English/German) in the medical domains. RESULTS: Our experiments show that these automatically extracted bilingual lexicons are accurate enough (85% precision for term extraction) for semi-automatically enriching mono- or bi-lingual thesauri such as the universal medical language system, and that their use in cross-language information retrieval significantly improves the retrieval performance (from 22 to 40% average precision) and clearly outperforms existing bilingual lexicon resources (both general lexicons and specialized ones). CONCLUSION: We show in this paper first that bilingual lexicon extraction from parallel corpora in the medical domain could lead to accurate, specialized lexicons, which can be used to help enrich existing thesauri and second that bilingual lexicons extracted from comparable corpora outperform general bilingual resources for cross-language information retrieval.

Electronic Data Processing↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The role of early language experience in the development of speech perception and phonological processing abilities: evidence from 5-year-olds with histories of otitis media with effusion and low socioeconomic status.

UNLABELLED: This study tested the hypothesis that early language experience facilitates the development of language-specific perceptual weighting strategies believed to be critical for accessing phonetic structure. In turn, that structure allows for efficient storage and retrieval of words in verbal working memory, which is necessary for sentence comprehension. Participants were forty-nine 5-year-olds, evenly distributed among four groups: those with chronic otitis media with effusion (OME), low socio-economic status (low-SES), both conditions (both), or neither condition (control). All children participated in tasks of speech perception and phonological awareness. Children in the control and OME groups participated in additional tasks examining verbal working memory, sentence comprehension, and temporal processing. The temporal-processing task tested the hypothesis that any deficits observed on the language-related tasks could be explained by temporal-processing deficits. Children in the three experimental groups demonstrated similar results to each other, but different from the control group for speech perception and phonological awareness. Children in the OME group differed from those in the control group on tasks involving verbal working memory and sentence comprehension, but not temporal processing. Overall these results supported the major hypothesis explored, but failed to support the hypothesis that language problems are explained to any extent by temporal-processing problems. LEARNING OUTCOMES: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to (1) Explain the relation between language experience and the development of mature speech perception strategies, phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and syntactic comprehension. (2) Name at least three populations of individuals who exhibit delays in the development of mature speech perception strategies, phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and syntactic comprehension, and explain why these delays exist for each group. (3) Point out why perceptual strategies for speech are different for different languages. (4) Describe Baddeley's model [A.D. Baddeley, The development of the concept of working memory: implications and contributions of neuropsychology, in: G. Vallar, T. Shallice (Eds.), Neuropsychological Impairments of Short-term Memory, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1990, p. 54] of verbal working memory.

Acoustic Impedance Tests↗

PubMed2005

Language lateralization development in children with autism: insights from the late field magnetoencephalogram.

Left hemisphere dominance represents the typical language lateralization profile for the majority of neurologically healthy, right-handed individuals. We investigated hemispheric dominance for language in language-impaired children with autism and typically developing controls to investigate the hypothesis that atypical functional specialization for language represents one component of developmental language impairment in autism. Late field magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were used to calculate a hemispheric Lateralization Index from the neuromagnetic activity evoked by passive auditory presentation of vowel stimuli. Results indicate that children with autism and typically developing children follow opposite maturational trajectories in language lateralization; while leftward lateralization (i.e. left hemisphere dominance) emerged from bilaterally symmetric neuronal activation as age increased in our sample of typically developing children, rightward lateralization emerged from bilaterally symmetric activity as age increased in our sample of children with autism.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMedDate not supplied

An emergent account of language impairments in children with SLI: implications for assessment and intervention.

While current theoretical accounts of language impairments in children with specific language impairment (SLI) provide clear direction with regard to intervention goal setting, these same accounts say little with regard to the intervention process. Current developments in connectionist modeling and the extension of principles of dynamical systems theory to cognitive and language development have resulted in a new theory of language development known as emergentism. In contrast to traditional formal linguistic accounts, the emergentist view holds that language is a dynamic evolving system that can be represented as a distribution of probabilistic information. Language acquisition, from this perspective, emerges from the child's simultaneous integration of multiple acoustic, linguistic, social and communicative cues within the context of the communicative interaction. An alternative account of SLI grounded within this emergentist view is presented, and preliminary implications are explored with respect to assessment and intervention.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Language transactions during development and intervention: theoretical implications for developmental neuroscience.

Recent modeling of language development and intervention for children with disabilities has increasingly focused on the interactions between adults and children. These models have resulted in a number of recent advances in the behavioral treatment of language abilities in children with disabilities. Because these interventions are associated with substantial growth in a number of skills including speech, grammar and vocabulary, these paradigms may provide a useful model for studying neurological development of these aspects of language. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential neurodevelopmental ramifications of this type of theoretical model for facilitating language growth in children with and without disabilities. Indeed, because intervention can sometimes trigger rapid advances in language skills and presumably, associated neurological organization, this may prove to be a very useful paradigm for understanding the neurological correlates of language growth.

Brain↗

PubMed2001

Article use in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment.

The current study analysed article use in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment who are learning English as a second language. The surface hypothesis account of specific language impairment was evaluated in relation to the use of articles in these children. Language samples were obtained from 15 Spanish-speaking children with language impairment and 15 with normal language, ages 5;0 to 7;1, matched by age, gender, and school. The percentage of article errors was tested between groups with a nonparametric analysis and an analysis of covariance with mean length of terminable unit as the covariate. Results revealed significant differences between groups on percent of article errors with and without MLTU as the covariate. Nonparametric statistics on percent of article error types indicated that most errors consisted of omissions and gender agreement substitutions. As predicted by the Surface Hypothesis, article errors were likely to occur in unstressed definite articles, suggesting that perceptual and prosodic processes have some impact on children's production of articles.

Child↗

PubMed2003

A family aggregation study: the influence of family history and other risk factors on language development.

Substantial evidence continues to accrue for familial transmission of specific language impairment (SLI). The incidence in families with a history of SLI is estimated at approximately 20%-40%, whereas in the general population the estimated incidence is about 4%. Typical aggregation studies compare data on the speech and language status of parents and siblings of individuals with SLI (the probands) to similar data from family members of control individuals with no speech or language disorder history. In the present study, family aggregation of SLI was examined for a unique sample of children who were ascertained before 6 months of age and thus did not have SLI, but were born into a family with a positive history of SLI (FH+). No study to date has examined the pattern of affectance in families of children ascertained at such a young age. In addition, the ratio of boys to girls born into such families was investigated, as previous studies have suggested alterations in the expected gender ratios. Consistent with prior research, SLI was found to aggregate in families; the average affectance rate in FH+ families was 32%, with significantly more boys (41%) reported as having SLI than girls (16%). A comparison of FH+ and control families (FH-) on sociodemographic factors and medical history revealed differences in the overall rate of autoimmune diseases; FH+ families reported a significantly higher incidence (35%) compared to FH- families (9%). Finally, the 3-year language abilities of a subset of 32 children from FH+ families were compared with those of 60 children from FH- families. Children from FH+ families scored significantly lower on standardized measures of language and were more likely to fall below the 16th percentile (28%) than children from FH- families (7%). These results provide converging evidence that children from FH+ families are indeed at greater risk of developing language delay compared to children from control families.

Autoimmune Diseases↗

PubMed2005

Age 13 language and reading outcomes in late-talking toddlers.

Language and reading outcomes at 13 years of age were examined in 28 children identified at 24 to 31 months as late talkers, all of whom came from middle- to upper-class socioeconomic status (SES) families and had normal nonverbal ability and age-adequate receptive language at intake. Late talkers were compared with a group of 25 typically developing children matched at intake on age, SES, and nonverbal ability. As a group, late talkers performed in the average range on all standardized language and reading tasks at age 13. However, they scored significantly lower than SES-matched peers on aggregate measures of vocabulary, grammar, and verbal memory, as well as on reading comprehension. They were similar to comparison peers in reading mechanics and writing aggregates. Intercorrelations between outcome measures were moderately high, suggesting considerable shared variance. Regression analyses indicated that age 2 Language Development Survey vocabulary score was a significant predictor of age 13 vocabulary, grammar, verbal memory, and reading comprehension. Findings suggest that slow language development at age 2-2 1/2 is associated with a weakness in language-related skills into adolescence relative to typically developing peers.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1981

Performance of children with normal and impaired oral language production on a set of auditory comprehension tests.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehension abilities of children with impaired expressive language and to obtain information on the interrelationships among tests of comprehension. Forty preschool children, 20 with normal language and 20 with impaired expressive language, were given a set of auditory comprehension tests. As a group, the language-impaired children demonstrated deficits in comprehension when compared to the normal-language children. However, both groups scored near the ceiling on several tests, and on most tests that did differentiate the two groups, the mean scores of both groups when applied to performances of middle-class white children. An analysis of responses to selected groupings of analogous items revealed that a preschool child's correct response to a linguistic stimulus in one instance provides no assurance that the child will respond similarly to the stimulus in another linguistic environment with different task demands and different foil alternatives. In addition, the large majority of correlations among the test were nonsignificant, indicating that it is not clinically appropriate to regard these measures of language comprehension as equivalent.

Child↗

PubMed1984

Hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities in language-impaired children.

This study sought to clarify further the cognitive abilities of language-impaired children by examining their hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. A discrimination learning task and a concept formation task were used to measure hypothesis-testing abilities, and a haptic (touch) recognition task was used to assess nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. Subjects were 10 language-impaired and 10 language-normal children matched for performance Mental Age. Measures of expressive and receptive language were also obtained from each child. The language-impaired children were found to perform significantly poorer than their MA controls on the haptic recognition task and on a portion of the discrimination learning task. No differences were found between the two groups' concept formation abilities. Correlational analyses revealed a particularly strong positive relationship between performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the haptic recognition tasks. It was speculated that this relationship was motivated by the symbolic demands of these tasks. One implication of this speculation is that a symbolic representational deficit might better explain the receptive language deficit than the expressive one.

Age Factors↗

PubMed1981

Disfluencies in the speech of language-delayed children.

This study attempted to determine whether language-delayed children receiving language therapy and language-delayed children not receiving language therapy differed from each other and from normal controls in the amount and type of disfluencies in their speech. Comparison of disfluencies in tape-recorded speech samples of three groups indicated that the one group of language-delayed children who received language therapy had significantly more word and part-word repetitions than the other two groups.

Child↗

PubMed1990

Development of children with early language delay.

Four children with early language delays (ELD) were compared to a control group of 12 children with respect to their preschool language abilities from age 2 1/2 to 5 years and their verbal skills at the end of Grade 2. The language-delayed children each initially showed severe and broad impairments in syntactic, phonological, and lexical production. Over time, their deficits became milder and more selective, such that normal or nearly normal speech and language proficiency was exhibited by age 60 months. Nevertheless, when followed up 3 years later, three of the four cases were severely reading disabled. These findings are discussed with respect to prior findings and hypotheses about the sequelae of early language delay and the relationship of language development to reading achievement.

Age Factors↗