Emergent Literacy in Spanish-Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Preliminary Findings of Delays in Comprehension- and Code-Related Skills

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (12) ◽  
pp. 4193-4207
Author(s):  
Amy S. Pratt ◽  
John A. Grinstead ◽  
Rebecca J. McCauley
Keyword(s):  
Emergent Literacy ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Writing Ability ◽  
Transparent Orthography ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Phonological Structure ◽  
Name Writing

Purpose This exploratory study describes the emergent literacy skills of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak Spanish, a language with a simple phonological structure and transparent orthography. We examine differences between children with DLD and their typically developing (TD) peers on a battery of emergent literacy measures. Method Participants included 15 monolingual Spanish-speaking children with DLD (who did not present with cognitive difficulties) and 15 TD controls matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status, ranging in age from 3;10 to 6;6 (years;months; M age = 4;11). All children completed a battery of comprehension-related emergent literacy tasks (narrative retell, print concept knowledge) and code-related emergent literacy tasks (beginning sound, rhyming awareness, alphabet knowledge, and name-writing ability). Results On average, children with DLD performed significantly worse than TD controls on a battery of comprehension- and code-related emergent literacy measures. On all code-related skills except rhyming, children with DLD were more likely than their TD peers to score “at risk.” Conclusions The results suggest some universality in the effect of DLD on reading development. Difficulties with emergent literacy that are widely documented in English-speaking children with DLD were similarly observed in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Future research should explore long-term reading outcomes in Spanish for children with DLD.

scholarly journals A preliminary evaluation of a manualised intervention to improve early literacy skills in children with Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
pp. 026565902110520
Author(s):  
Anna Louise Taylor ◽  
Samuel David Calder ◽  
Simmone Pogorzelski ◽  
Stagoll Lauren Koch
Keyword(s):  
Early Literacy ◽  
Oral Language ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Intervention Group ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Preliminary Evaluation ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Early Literacy Skills ◽  
Tier 1

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) commonly present with oral language weaknesses which disrupt the development of literacy and impede related academic progress. While there is evidence to support the delivery of manualised Tier 2 interventions with this population, little is known about the effects of Tier 1 interventions. A retrospective cohort comparison was used to evaluate whether there was an observable effect of a manualised Tier 1 intervention compared to ‘business-as-usual’ on early literacy skills for children with DLD. Participants were 140 children attending a specialised education program with equivalent oral language skills and alphabetic knowledge at baseline. After 18 months formal literacy intervention, both groups were assessed on measures of early literacy skills. The differences between group means on all measures favoured the manualised intervention group, and they performed significantly better on a measure of nonword reading fluency. The findings indicate that a manualised Tier 1 intervention may be advantageous for children with DLD in developing proficiency in phonological recoding. This research contributes to the sparse evidence-base supporting the implementation of Tier 1 interventions for at risk populations, and findings warrant future research using experimental designs with tighter controls.

The Impact of Mobile Learning via Touch-Screen Tablets in Emergent Literacy Development

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Ioannis Grigorakis
Keyword(s):  
Emergent Literacy ◽  
Mobile Learning ◽  
Literacy Development ◽  
School Setting ◽  
Touch Screen ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Print Awareness ◽  
Emergent Literacy Skills ◽  
Name Writing

Children's use of touch-screen tablets is increasing as these mobile devices become increasingly available. The interactive, tactile touch-screen interface and easily downloadable applications make tablets especially popular with pre-schoolers. This chapter's literature review provides an overview of recent research into tablets and emergent literacy development at home and in the pre-school setting. A multi-faceted synthesis of research on children's use of tablets and its impact in emergent literacy skills was conducted. The evidence indicated that mobile learning via touch-screen tablets has the potential to broadly enhance emergent writing and may facilitate the development of letter name/sound knowledge, print awareness, letter writing and name writing skills, and phonological awareness. The relation between the use of tablets and emergent literacy development seems to be complex as it is mediated by factors such as the type of multisensory experiences through literacy applications and the type of scaffolding used by adults. Recommendations and directions for future research are discussed.

Sentence Repetition: A Clinical Marker for Developmental Language Disorder in Danish

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4450-4463
Author(s):  
Rikke Vang Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Likelihood Ratios ◽  
Clinical Marker ◽  
Sentence Repetition ◽  
Good Identification ◽  
Syntactic Properties

Purpose The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task—including specific morphological and syntactic properties—to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a clinical marker for Danish DLD was explored. Method SR performance of children with DLD aged 5;10–14;1 (years;months; n = 27) and TD children aged 5;3–13;4 ( n = 87) was investigated. Results Compared to TD same-age peers, children with DLD were less likely to repeat the sentences accurately but more likely to make ungrammatical errors with respect to verb inflection and use of determiners and personal pronouns. Younger children with DLD also produced more word order errors that their TD peers. Furthermore, older children with DLD performed less accurately than younger TD peers, indicating that the SR task taps into morphosyntactic areas of particular difficulty for Danish children with DLD. The classification accuracy associated with SR performance showed high levels of sensitivity and specificity (> 90%) and likelihood ratios indicating good identification potential for clinical and future research purposes. Conclusion SR performance has a strong potential for identifying children with DLD, also in Danish, and with a carefully designed SR task, performance has potential for revealing morphosyntactic difficulties. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.10314437

Prosodic skills of Spanish‐speaking children with developmental language disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuria Calet ◽  
Manuel Ángel Martín‐Peregrina ◽  
Gracia Jiménez‐Fernández ◽  
Pastora Martínez‐Castilla
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Spanish Speaking

scholarly journals Syntactic Gender Agreement Processing on Direct-Object Clitics by Spanish-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from ERP

Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Paloma Roa-Rojas ◽  
John Grinstead ◽  
Juan Silva-Pereyra ◽  
Thalía Fernández ◽  
Mario Rodríguez-Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Processing Technique ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Anterior Negativity ◽  
Gender Features

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging evidence of this deficit can be found. In particular, we use the real-time processing technique of event-related brain potentials (ERP) with direct-object clitic pronouns in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Our participants include 15 six-year-old Mexican Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically developing, age-matched (TD) children. Auditory sentences that matched or did not match the gender features of antecedents represented in pictures were employed as stimuli in a visual–auditory gender agreement task. Gender-agreement violations were associated with an enhanced anterior negativity between 250 and 500 ms post-target onset in the TD children group. In contrast, children with DLD showed no such effect. This absence of the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect suggests weaker lexical representation of morphosyntactic gender features and/or non-adult-like morphosyntactic gender feature checking for the DLD children. We discuss the relevance of these findings for theoretical accounts of DLD. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of syntactic agreement processing and language disorders.

scholarly journals MOSAIC+: a cross-linguistic model of verb-marking in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Freudenthal ◽  
Fernand Gobet ◽  
Julian Pine
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Factor Model ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
Frequent Form ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Cross

This study extends an existing cross-linguistic model of verb-marking error in children’s early multi-word speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations show that the resulting dual-factor model not only provides a better explanation of the data on typically developing (TD) children, but also captures the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), including the tendency of English-speaking children to show higher rates of Optional Infinitive (OI) errors and the tendency of Dutch-, German- and Spanish-speaking children to show higher rates of agreement errors. The new version of MOSAIC thus provides a unified cross-linguistic model of the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and children with DLD.

The Impact of Intervention Dose Form on Oral Language Outcomes for Children With Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Pauline Frizelle ◽  
Anna-Kaisa Tolonen ◽  
Josie Tulip ◽  
Carol-Anne Murphy ◽  
David Saldana ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Reviews ◽  
Oral Language ◽  
Intervention Studies ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Optimal Dose ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dose Form

Purpose The aim of this study was to extract key learning from intervention studies in which qualitative aspects of dosage, dose form , have been examined for children with developmental language disorder (DLD)—in vocabulary, morphosyntax, and phonology domains. This research paper emerged from a pair of systematic reviews, aiming to synthesize available evidence regarding qualitative and quantitative aspects of dosage. While quantitative aspects had been experimentally manipulated, the available evidence for dose form (tasks or activities within which teaching episodes are delivered) was less definitive. Despite this, the review uncovered insights of value to DLD research. Method A preregistered systematic review (PROSPERO ID: CRD42017076663) adhering to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines was completed. Included papers were quasi-experimental, randomized controlled trial, or cohort analytic studies, published in any language between January 2006 and May 2019; oral language interventions with vocabulary, morphosyntax, or phonology outcomes; and participants with DLD ( M = 3–18 years). The intention was to include papers in which dose form was experimentally manipulated or statistically analyzed, while quantitative dosage aspects were controlled, such that definitive conclusions about optimal dose form could be drawn and gaps in the evidence identified. Results Two hundred and twenty-four papers met the above inclusion criteria; 27 focused on dose form . No study controlled for all quantitative aspects of dosage such that we could effectively address our original research questions. Despite this, key points of learning emerged with implications for future research. Conclusions There is tentative evidence of advantages for explicit over implicit instruction and of the benefits of variability in input, elicited production, and gestural and other visual supports. With careful design of dose form, there is potential to design more efficient interventions. Speech-language pathology research would benefit from an agreed taxonomy of dose form components and standardized reporting of intervention studies, to enable cross-study comparisons and a systematic accrual of knowledge to identify optimal dose form for clinical application.

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