The Relationship Between Phonological Memory, Receptive Vocabulary, and Fast Mapping in Young Children With Specific Language Impairment

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 955-969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Gray
2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Alt ◽  
Elena Plante ◽  
Marlena Creusere

This study examined the receptive language skills of young children (4–6 years old) with specific language impairment (SLI). Specifically, the authors looked at their ability to fast-map semantic features of objects and actions and compared it to the performance of age-matched peers with normally developing language (NL). Children completed a computer task during which they were exposed to novel objects and actions with novel names. The children then were asked questions about the semantic features of these novel objects and actions. Overall, the questions about actions were more difficult for children than objects. The children with SLI were able to recognize fewer semantic features than were their peers with NL. They also performed poorly relative to their peers on a lexical label recognition task. These results lend support to the idea that children with SLI have broader difficulties with receptive vocabulary than simply a reduced ability to acquire labels.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Gray

Thirty preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 30 agematched controls with normal language (NL) participated in a study to compare group performance and to examine the relationship between fast mapping and word learning and between comprehension and production of new words. The groups performed similarly on the fast-mapping task. The NL group comprehended and produced significantly more words than the SLI group, and did so in fewer trials. Language test scores did not predict word-learning performance for either group. Some children with SLI may need to hear a new word twice as many times as their NL peers before comprehending it and may need twice as many opportunities to practice producing the word before using it independently.


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Frome Loeb ◽  
Clifton Pye ◽  
Sean Redmond ◽  
Lori Zobel Richardson

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.


1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Fazio

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.


2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
GISELA HÅKANSSON ◽  
KRISTINA HANSSON

The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between language comprehension and language production in Swedish children. This was done longitudinally with 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 4;0 to 6;3 at Time I, and 10 children with unimpaired language development, aged 3;1 to 3;7 at Time I. The target structure was subordination, more precisely relative clauses. The children's comprehension was tested with picture pointing, act-out and oral response tests. Their production was tested with elicited imitation and sentence completion tests. Data were collected twice, with an interval of six months. The results from the unimpaired children at Time I showed a difference between comprehension and production. At Time II these children scored higher on production than on comprehension. The children with SLI scored significantly higher on comprehension than on production at Time I. In half of the SLI group there was a clear development between the two data collection sessions, diminishing the dissociation. On neither testing did the children with SLI differ significantly from the unimpaired children in comprehension. At both testings, however, the children with SLI had significantly more responses where they did not insert the complementizer in relative clauses. The results indicate that the relationship between comprehension and production is different at different stages in development. They also show that structures involving dependency relations are particularly difficult to produce for children with SLI.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document