scholarly journals Sentence Comprehension in Specific Language Impairment: A Task Designed to Distinguish Between Cognitive Capacity and Syntactic Complexity

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Patricia Deevy ◽  
Marc E. Fey ◽  
Shelley L. Bredin-Oja
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Item Types

Purpose This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Method Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity, based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture. Results The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure. Conclusions The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence.

Grammatical Morphology Deficits in Spanish-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-924 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Clinical Markers ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person

The focus of this study was the use of grammatical morphology by Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance (MLUs), the children with SLI showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement inflections and direct object clitics. Most errors on the part of children in all groups consisted of substitutions of a form that shared most but not all of the target’s grammatical features (e.g., correct tense and number but incorrect person). Number errors usually involved singular forms used in plural contexts; person errors usually involved third person forms used in first person contexts. The pattern of limitations of the children with SLI suggests that, for languages such as Spanish, additional factors might have to be considered in the search for clinical markers for this disorder. Implications for evaluation and treatment of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children are also discussed.

scholarly journals Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenni Heikkilä ◽  
Eila Lonka ◽  
Sanna Ahola ◽  
Auli Meronen ◽  
Kaisa Tiippana
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Visual Speech ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Phonological Skills ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Cognitive Correlates

PurposeLipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).MethodForty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.ResultsChildren with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers. Good phonological skills were associated with skilled lipreading in both typically developing children and in children with SLI. Lipreading was also found to correlate with several cognitive skills, for example, short-term memory capacity and verbal motor skills.ConclusionsSpeech processing deficits in SLI extend also to the perception of visual speech. Lipreading performance was associated with phonological skills. Poor lipreading in children with SLI may be, thus, related to problems in phonological processing.

scholarly journals Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
FLAVIA ADANI ◽  
MATTEO FORGIARINI ◽  
MARIA TERESA GUASTI ◽  
HEATHER K. J. VAN DER LELY
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Receptive Vocabulary ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
English Speaking

ABSTRACTThis study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

scholarly journals Syntactic Versus Memory Accounts of the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of Specific Language Impairment: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (6) ◽  
pp. 1491-1504 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Montgomery ◽  
Ronald B. Gillam ◽  
Julia L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Proper Modification

Purpose Compared with same-age typically developing peers, school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit significant deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. They also demonstrate a range of memory limitations. Whether these 2 deficit areas are related is unclear. The present review article aims to (a) review 2 main theoretical accounts of SLI sentence comprehension and various studies supporting each and (b) offer a new, broader, more integrated memory-based framework to guide future SLI research, as we believe the available evidence favors a memory-based perspective of SLI comprehension limitations. Method We reviewed the literature on the sentence comprehension abilities of English-speaking children with SLI from 2 theoretical perspectives. Results The sentence comprehension limitations of children with SLI appear to be more fully captured by a memory-based perspective than by a syntax-specific deficit perspective. Conclusions Although a memory-based view appears to be the better account of SLI sentence comprehension deficits, this view requires refinement and expansion. Current memory-based perspectives of adult sentence comprehension, with proper modification, offer SLI investigators new, more integrated memory frameworks within which to study and better understand the sentence comprehension abilities of children with SLI.

What do monolingual and bilingual children with and without SLI produce when phonology is too complex?

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laetitia de Almeida ◽  
Sandrine Ferré ◽  
Marie-Anne Barthez ◽  
Christophe dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Repetition Task

In this study, the authors compare the production of internal codas and branching onsets in four groups of children learning French: monolingual typically-developing children ( n = 12), bilingual typically-developing children ( n = 61), monolingual children with Specific Language Impairment ( n = 17) and bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment ( n = 20). Their elicited productions were collected using a nonword repetition task (LITMUS-NWR-French), containing 71 nonwords with different syllable types. Except for typically-developing monolingual children, all children performed significantly better on branching onsets than on internal codas. Moreover, the repair strategies used in erroneous productions also indicate that children had more difficulties with internal codas: all the cases of metathesis affecting a target internal coda resulted in the production of a branching onset whereas the contrary was not observed. The differences in the rates of target-like production and the patterns of metathesis of these two structures suggest that internal codas are more difficult than branching onsets for children learning French.

Verb inflections and noun phrase morphology in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
LISA M. BEDORE ◽  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
General Linguistic ◽  
Verb Inflections ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The children with SLI showed high levels of accuracy on present tense and past tense (preterite) verb inflections. However, their use of definite articles and direct object clitics was significantly more problematic than for either the TD-MLU or the TD-A children. Substitutions and omissions were observed, especially in contexts requiring plural articles and clitics. Many of the details of the observed Spanish SLI profile were predicted by Wexler's (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) proposal. Remaining details in the data could be accommodated by making additional assumptions within the same general linguistic framework as the EUCC. Some of the differences between the findings from Spanish and those from previous studies on related languages such as Italian suggest the need for clinical assessment and intervention procedures that are shaped as much by language-specific details as by the language's typology.

Dative prepositions in children with specific language impairment

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
BERNARD GRELA ◽  
LULA RASHITI ◽  
MONICA SOARES
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Word Selection ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance ◽  
Omission Errors ◽  
Selection Of

The purpose of this study was to evaluate children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their proficiency with the use of prepositions. Ten children with SLI were compared to 10 younger, normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance and 10 children matched for age. Each child was asked to produce 24 sentences containing locative (in, on) and dative (to) prepositions. Responses were coded for omission or word selection errors for the target prepositions. It was hypothesized that children with SLI would make more errors than the typically developing children. Omission errors would support a difficulty with syntax because of the role prepositions play in case marking. Word selection errors would support a deficit in the area of semantics. The results confirmed that children with SLI made more errors than the control group. The children with SLI made more errors in the selection of dative prepositions, indicating a difficulty linking the semantics of prepositions and verbs.

Lexical Diversity in the Spontaneous Speech of Children With Specific Language Impairment

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 927-937 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda J. Owen ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Sample Size ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Developmental Differences ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

The lexical diversity of children with specific language impairment (SLI) (ages 3 years 7 months to 7 years 3 months) was compared to that of normally developing same-age peers and younger normally developing children matched according to mean length of utterance in words (MLUw). Lexical diversity was calculated from spontaneous speech samples using D, a measure that uses repeated calculations of type-token ratio (TTR) to estimate how TTR changes as the speech samples increase in size. When D computations were based on 250-word samples, developmental differences were apparent. For both children with SLI and typically developing children, older subgroups showed higher D scores than younger subgroups, and subgroups with higher MLUws showed higher D scores than subgroups with lower MLUws. Children with SLI did not differ from same-age peers. At lower MLUw levels, children with SLI showed higher D scores than younger typically developing children matched for MLUw. The developmental sensitivity of D notwithstanding, comparisons using 100-utterance samples, in which the number of lexical tokens varied as a function of the children's MLUws, and comparisons between 250- and 500-word samples revealed the possible influence of sample size on this measure. However, analysis of the effect sizes using smaller and larger samples revealed that D is not affected by sample size to the degree seen for more traditional measures of lexical diversity.

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