The count-mass distinction in typically developing and grammatically specifically language impaired children: New evidence on the role of syntax and semantics

Most software for language analysis has relied on an interaction between the metalinguistic skills of a human coder and the calculating ability of the machine to produce reliable results. However, probabilistic parsing algorithms are now capable of highly accurate and completely automatic identification of grammatical word classes. The program Computerized Profiling combines a probabilistic parser with modules customized to produce four clinical grammatical analyses: MLU, LARSP, IPSyn, and DSS. The accuracy of these analyses was assessed on 69 language samples from typically developing, speech-impaired, and language-impaired children, 2 years 6 months to 7 years 10 months. Values obtained with human coding and by the software alone were compared. Results for all four analyses produced automatically were comparable to published data on the manual interrater reliability of these procedures. Clinical decisions based on cutoff scores and productivity data were little affected by the use of automatic rather than human-generated analyses. These findings bode well for future clinical and research use of automatic language analysis software.

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A therapy programme for pre-school language impaired children

South African Journal of Communication Disorders ◽

10.4102/sajcd.v23i1.383 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Linda Narun

Keyword(s):

Language Learning ◽

Discrimination Learning ◽

Syntactic Analysis ◽

Developmental Sequence ◽

Language Impaired ◽

Auxiliary Verbs ◽

Impaired Children ◽

Therapy Programme

This study aimed to establish effective language programmes for pre-school language impaired children based on psycholinguistic principles. Eight language-impaired children 6 males and 2 females between the ages of 3 and 6 years, were the subjects. Language samples were transcribed and subjected to syntactic analysis; semantic aspects were also considered and programmes developed for each subject, based on the information obtained from the language analyses. A developmental sequence was adopted as the basis for therapy A 'slot-method' was used in which language was taught as rule-operated behaviour Principles of discrimination learning were adopted for teaching some aspects of grammar. Auxiliary verbs are reported in detail as this was the most universal error and difficult to teach. The role of imitation in language learning and therapy is discussed.

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A Drawing Task to Assess Emotion Inference in Language-Impaired Children

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2015_jslhr-l-14-0343 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 58 (5) ◽

pp. 1563-1569 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Nathalie Vendeville ◽

Nathalie Blanc ◽

Claire Brechet

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Typically Developing Children ◽

Free Response ◽

Verbal Responses ◽

Language Impaired ◽

Response Range ◽

Drawing Task ◽

Impaired Children ◽

Selection Of

Purpose Studies investigating the ability of children with language impairment (LI) to infer emotions rely on verbal responses (which can be challenging for these children) and/or the selection of a card representing an emotion (which limits the response range). In contrast, a drawing task might allow a broad spectrum of responses without involving language. This study used a drawing task to compare the ability to make emotional inferences in children with and without LI. Method Twenty-two children with LI and 22 typically developing children ages 6 to 10 years were assessed in school during 3 sessions. They were asked to listen to audio stories. At specific moments, the experimenter stopped the recording and asked children to complete the drawing of a face to depict the emotion felt by the story's character. Three adult study-blind judges were subsequently asked to evaluate the expressiveness of the drawings. Results Children with LI had more difficulty than typically developing children making emotional inferences. Children with LI also made more errors of different valence than their typically developing peers. Conclusion Our findings confirm that children with LI show difficulty in producing emotional inferences, even when performing a drawing task—a relatively language-free response mode.

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Observing iconic gestures enhances word learning in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000916000647 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 44 (6) ◽

pp. 1458-1484 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

SUSANNE VOGT ◽

CHRISTINA KAUSCHKE

Keyword(s):

Word Learning ◽

Language Impairment ◽

Specific Language Impairment ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Typically Developing Children ◽

Iconic Gesture ◽

Specific Language ◽

New Words ◽

Language Impaired ◽

Impaired Children

AbstractResearch has shown that observing iconic gestures helps typically developing children (TD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) learn new words. So far, studies mostly compared word learning with and without gestures. The present study investigated word learning under two gesture conditions in children with and without language impairment. Twenty children with SLI (age four), twenty age-matched TD children, and twenty language-matched TD children were taught words that were presented with either iconic or non-iconic gestures. Results showed that children of all groups benefited more successfully from observing iconic gestures for word learning. The iconic gesture advantage was similar across groups. Thus, observing iconic gestures prompts richer encoding and makes word learning more efficient in TD and language impaired children.

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Morphosyntactic weaknesses in Developmental Language Disorder: the role of structure and agreement configurations

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000919000709 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 47 (5) ◽

pp. 909-944 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Vincenzo MOSCATI ◽

Luigi RIZZI ◽

Ilenia VOTTARI ◽

Anna Maria CHILOSI ◽

Renata SALVADORINI ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Disorder ◽

Forced Choice ◽

Choice Task ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Developmental Language Disorder ◽

The Hierarchical Structure ◽

Forced Choice Task ◽

Structural Distance ◽

New Evidence

AbstractAgreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

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