Processing and Linguistic Markers in Young Children With Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1029-1037 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Conti-Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Stepwise Discriminant Analysis ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digit Recall

Thirty-two 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 32 chronological age (CA) controls completed 4 tasks that were considered potential positive markers for SLI. Children's performance on 2 linguistic tasks (past tense and noun plurals task) and 2 processing tasks (nonword repetition and digit recall) were examined. This approach allowed the examination of more than 1 type of marker simultaneously, facilitating both comparisons between markers and also the evaluation of combinations of markers in relation to identifying SLI. Children with SLI performed significantly worse than CA controls in all 4 marker tasks. Specificity/sensitivity analysis of the 4 marker tasks revealed nonword repetition and the past tense task to have the best overall accuracy at the 25th and 16th percentile. Finally, stepwise discriminant analysis revealed nonword repetition and past tense marking to be the best markers for identifying young children with SLI.

scholarly journals Tense and aspect in sentence interpretation by children with specific language impairment

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ◽  
PATRICIA DEEVY
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Scene Matching ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Progressive

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from Wagner (2001). Sentences were in either present or past progressive and used telic predicates. Actions were performed twice in succession; the action was either completed or not completed in the first instance. In both experiments, the children with SLI were less accurate than the TD children, showing more difficulty with past than present progressive, regardless of completion cues. The TD children were less accurate with past than present progressive requests only when the past actions were incomplete. These findings suggest that children with SLI may be relatively insensitive to cues pertaining to event completion in past tense contexts.

scholarly journals Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (9) ◽  
pp. 3443-3461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna B. Oetting ◽  
Jessica R. Berry ◽  
Kyomi D. Gregory ◽  
Andrew M. Rivière ◽  
Janet McDonald
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
Strategic Approach

Purpose In African American English and Southern White English, we examined whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) overtly mark tense and agreement structures at lower percentages than typically developing (TD) controls, while also examining the effects of dialect, structure, and scoring approach. Method One hundred six kindergartners completed 4 dialect-informed probes targeting 8 tense and agreement structures. The 3 scoring approaches varied in the treatment of nonmainstream English forms and responses coded as Other (i.e., those not obligating the target structure). The unmodified approach counted as correct only mainstream overt forms out of all responses, the modified approach counted as correct all mainstream and nonmainstream overt forms and zero forms out of all responses, and the strategic approach counted as correct all mainstream and nonmainstream overt forms out of all responses except those coded as Other. Results With the probes combined and separated, the unmodified and strategic scoring approaches showed lower percentages of overt marking by the SLI groups than by the TD groups; this was not always the case for the modified scoring approach. With strategic scoring and dialect-specific cut scores, classification accuracy (SLI vs. TD) was highest for the 8 individual structures considered together, the past tense probe, and the past tense probe irregular items. Dialect and structure effects and dialect differences in classification accuracy also existed. Conclusions African American English– and Southern White English–speaking kindergartners with SLI overtly mark tense and agreement at lower percentages than same dialect–speaking TD controls. Strategic scoring of dialect-informed probes targeting tense and agreement should be pursued in research and clinical practice.

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.

Specific Language Impairment in Swedish

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Hansson ◽  
Ulrika Nettelbladt ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Appropriate Use ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

Several competing proposals have been offered to explain the grammatical difficulties experienced by children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study, the grammatical abilities of Swedish-speaking children with SLI were examined for the purpose of evaluating these proposals and offering new findings that might be used in the development of alternative accounts. A group of preschoolers with SLI showed lower percentages of use of present tense copula forms and regular past tense inflections than normally developing peers matched for age and younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). Word order errors, too, were more frequent in the speech of the children with SLI. However, these children performed as well as MLU-matched children in the use of present tense inflections and irregular past forms. In addition, the majority of their sentences containing word order errors showed appropriate use of verb morphology. None of the competing accounts of SLI could accommodate all of the findings. In particular, these accounts—or new alternatives —must develop provisions to explain both the earlier acquisition of present tense inflections than past tense inflections and word order errors that seem unrelated to verb morphology.

scholarly journals Do nonword repetition errors in children with specific language impairment reflect a weakness in an unidentified skill specific to nonword repetition or a deficit in simultaneous processing?

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klara Marton
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
Simultaneous Processing ◽  
Error Analyses ◽  
Double Deficit

This Commentary supports Gathercole's (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to memory for nonwords: general cognitive abilities, phonological storage, and an unidentified skill specific to nonword repetition. The focus of this Commentary is to examine whether these children's nonword repetition performance is influenced by an unidentified skill or some other processes. An alternative hypothesis is that the nonword repetition errors observed in children with SLI are related to one of their main weaknesses, to their difficulties in simultaneous processing of information. Evidence for this argument comes from our recent studies: from error analyses data and from findings on nonword repetition with stimuli that included meaningful parts (monosyllabic real words).

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.

Past-Tense Marking by Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna B. Oetting ◽  
Janice E. Horohov
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Impaired Group ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Morphological System

This study examined the productivity and representation of past-tense marking in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants were 11 6-year-olds with SLI, 11 age-matched controls, and 11 MLU-matched controls. Regular and irregular verbs were used to examine the productivity of regular marking. Past-tense representation was examined by asking children to inflect homophonous pairs of denominal and irregular root verbs. All three groups demonstrated productive marking of past tense, although as expected the accuracy of the impaired group was less than that of either control group. Patterns of past-tense marking as a function of a word's phonological composition and inflectional frequency were the same for the SLI- and MLU-matched groups, and all children presented a past-tense system that was sensitive to grammatical structure. The findings replicate previous research of the SLI morphological system and provide additional specification of these children's morphological strengths and weaknesses. Strengths include the children's sensitivity to grammatical and phonological characteristics of the lexicon; weaknesses include limited productivity of regular past-tense marking and a greater sensitivity to frequency manipulations as compared to normally developing children. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of the SLI profile. They also are used to evaluate the theoretical model on which the study was based.

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