Eliciting Verbs From Children With Specific Language Impairment

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Frome Loeb ◽  
Clifton Pye ◽  
Sean Redmond ◽  
Lori Zobel Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Lexical Skills

The focus of assessment and intervention is often aimed at increasing the lexical skills of young children with language impairment. Frequently, the use of nouns is the center of the lexical assessment. As a result, the production of verbs is not fully evaluated or integrated into treatment in a way that accounts for their semantic and syntactic complexity. This paper presents a probe for eliciting verbs from children, describes its effectiveness, and discusses the utility of and problems associated with developing such a probe.

Memory for rote linguistic routines and sensitivity to rhyme: A comparison of low-income children with and without specific language impairment

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Fazio
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Relative Performance ◽  
Classroom Activity ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Lower Performance ◽  
Low Income Children ◽  
Before And After

ABSTRACTThis report describes two studies on memory for rote linguistic sequences and sensitivity to rhyme in young children with and without language impairment. In the first study, 10 low income kindergarteners with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared with age- and income-matched classmates on reciting common nursery rhymes, reciting the alphabet, and rote counting. Children with SLI displayed lower performance on most of the rote linguistic sequence tasks, especially on (heir knowledge of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The second study examined the learning and retention of nursery rhymes in 8 young children with SLI after 6 weeks of classroom instruction. Low-income, 4- and 5-year-old children with SLI and their age- and income-matched classmates were taught five novel Mother Goose rhymes during a large-group classroom activity. Children were tested before and after the intervention on their ability to recite nursery rhymes and to detect rhyme. When compared with their peers, children with SLI had difficulty repeating the nursery rhymes, despite daily classroom exposure. Although the performance of children with SLI on rhyme recitation and detection tasks was poor, their relative performance was better on a cloze task based on the set of nursery rhymes. The results of this study suggest that children with SLI have difficulty storing and/or retrieving lines of memorized text. Traditional informal techniques for teaching rote linguistic sequences may need to be modified to give children with SLI more opportunities to practice rote sequences.

Early Verb-Related Vulnerability Among Children With Specific Language Impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1384-1397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela A. Hadley
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Expressive Language ◽  
Language Impairments ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Grammatical Development ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
Developmental Progression

The purpose of this study was to characterize the nature of early grammatical development among very young children with specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical development was examined for two subtypes: (a) children with expressive language impairments only (SLI-E) and (b) children with both receptive and expressive language impairments (SLI-RE). In particular, characteristics of noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VP) elaboration were examined longitudinally to determine whether structures associated with NP and VP emerged together following a typical developmental progression. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990). However, specific weakness in VP elaboration was revealed on the IPSyn as well as in more extensive productivity analyses. The contribution of these findings to a developmentally sensitive grammatical description of SLI for very young children is discussed.

Unusual Phonological Behavior and the Avoidance of Homonymy in Children

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Richard G. Schwartz ◽  
George D. Allen ◽  
Lori A. Swanson ◽  
Diane Frome Loeb
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Novel Words

Young children sometimes make use of unusual phonological patterns even when they already possess the appropriate sound or a suitable substitute in their phonological systems. In this investigation, we attempted to determine whether in such instances unusual sound changes enable children to avoid potential homonymy with other words in their lexicons. Novel words were presented to children, half serving as potential homonyms, half as unlikely homonyms. The children's acquisition of these words was monitored. For a group of normally developing children, unusual sound changes were found to be more frequent in the words with the potential for homonymy. In contrast, a group of children with specific language impairment showed the same degree of unusual usage for both types of words. The findings suggest that children with specific language impairment are especially limited in their ability to capitalize on the phonetic regularities of the language.

Parental Recasts and Production of Copulas and Articles by Children With Specific Language Impairment and Typical Language

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Proctor-Williams ◽  
Marc E. Fey ◽  
Diane Frome Loeb
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Environmental Exposure ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
The Other ◽  
Positive Relation ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The Third

In intervention, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to develop productive use of morphemes in response to target-specific recasts at rates generally equivalent to younger, language-matched children with typical language development (TL). Our previous work demonstrated that in conversation, the overall recast rates produced by parents of children with SLI and those with TL are similar. Still, despite their apparently typical ability to use recast input in intervention and their equivalent environmental exposure to recasts, children with SLI continue to demonstrate grammatical delays in comparison to children with TL. The purpose of this study was to examine three possible resolutions to this paradox. We examined target-specific copula and article recast usage by 10 parents of children with SLI and 10 parents of younger language-matched children with TL, and we examined their children’s productions of these same forms at three points across an 8-month period. The results provide strong support only for the third of the proposed hypotheses. Contrary to the predictions of the first hypothesis, a strong, positive relation was observed between the copula recasts used by parents of children with TL at Time 1 and their children’s use of copulas 8 months later. On the other hand, correlations between recasts of articles by parents and later production of articles by their children were not statistically reliable. Contrary to the second hypothesis, parents of children with SLI and those with TL produced equivalent rates of article and copula recasts. The third hypothesis received support on two essential counts. First, although significant correlations were found between parental recasts of copulas and production of this form 8 months later for the children with TL, no such relations were observed for the group with SLI. Second, the rate of parental target-specific recasts was less than a quarter of the rate provided in the successful intervention of Camarata, Nelson, and Camarata (1994). We conclude that children with SLI can benefit substantially from the grammar-facilitating properties of recasts, but only when the recasts are presented at rates that are much greater than those available in typical conversations with young children.

Working Memory Capacity and Language Processes in Children With Specific Language Impairment

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1138-1153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klara Marton ◽  
Richard G. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
Phonological Loop ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Specific Language

This study examined the interaction between working memory and language comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI), focusing on the function of the central executive component and its interaction with the phonological loop (A. D. Baddeley, 1986) in complex working memory tasks. Thirteen children with SLI and 13 age-matched (age range=7;0 [years;months] to 10;0) children with typical language development participated. The tasks combined traditional nonword repetition tests and sentence comprehension by using sentences that differed in length and syntactic complexity. The children with SLI exhibited larger processing and attentional capacity limitations than their age-matched peers. Increased word length and syntactic complexity resulted in a large performance decrease in nonword repetition in both groups. There were some variations in the error pattern, which may indicate qualitative differences between the 2 groups. The performance of the children with SLI in nonword repetition, across the different tasks, indicated a limitation in simultaneous processing rather than difficulty in encoding and analyzing the phonological structure of the nonwords. Furthermore, syntactic complexity had a greater effect on performance accuracy than did sentence length.

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