scholarly journals The Fast-Mapping Abilities of Adults With Developmental Language Disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (9) ◽  
pp. 3117-3129
Author(s):  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
Nichole Eden ◽  
Timothy Arbisi-Kelm ◽  
Jacob Oleson
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Recognition Performance ◽  
Semantic Category ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Choice Test ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Fast Mapping ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Mapping Condition

Purpose The aim of the study was to determine the integrity of fast mapping among adults with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method Forty-eight adults with DLD or typical language development (TD) were presented with 24 novel words and photos of their unfamiliar referents from the semantic categories of mammal, bird, fruit, or insect in two conditions. In the fast-mapping condition, 12 of the 24 unfamiliar referents were presented, one at a time alongside a familiar referent (e.g., a dog) and a question (e.g., Is the tail of the torato up? ). In the explicit-encoding condition, the other 12 unfamiliar referents were presented alone, one at a time, with a label (e.g., This is a spimer ). Immediately after exposure (T1) and again after a 1-day interval (T2), memory for the word-to-exemplar link was measured with a three-alternative forced-choice test, requiring the participant to match a spoken word to one of three pictured referents from the training set. At T2, memory for semantic category information was measured with a four-alternative forced-choice test, requiring the participant to match a spoken word to one of four prototypical silhouettes representing each of the semantic categories. Results Performance on word-to-exemplar link recognition was stronger for words learned in the explicit-encoding than the fast-mapping condition and stronger for the TD group than the DLD group. Time was not a significant factor as both groups maintained posttraining levels of performance after a 1-day retention interval. Performance on semantic category recognition was stronger for words learned in the explicit-encoding than the fast-mapping condition and stronger for the TD group than the DLD group. The lower category recognition performance of the DLD group was related to their lower nonverbal IQ scores. Conclusion Contexts that allow for explicit encoding yield better learning of word-to-referent links than contexts that allow for fast mapping in both stronger and weaker learners. Adults with DLD have difficulty learning the link between words and referents, whether trained via fast mapping or explicit encoding and whether tested with exemplar or category referents. Retention is a relative strength for adults with DLD. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12765551

scholarly journals Semantic Category Convergence in Spanish–English Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (7) ◽  
pp. 2361-2371
Author(s):  
Prarthana Shivabasappa ◽  
Elizabeth D. Peña ◽  
Lisa M. Bedore
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Semantic Category ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Semantic Fluency ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Lexical Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Age Range

Purpose The study examines the extent of convergence of semantic category members in Spanish–English bilingual children with reference to adults using a semantic fluency task. Method Thirty-seven children with developmental language disorder (DLD), matched pairwise with 37 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7;0–9;11 (years;months), produced items in 7 semantic categories (3 taxonomic and 4 slot-filler) in both Spanish and English. The 10 most frequently produced items for each category by 20 Spanish–English bilingual adults were identified as the most prototypical responses. The top 10 items generated by TD children and children with DLD, in their order of production, were analyzed for the amount of convergence with adults' responses. Results The top 5 items produced by children with DLD showed similar convergence scores as those produced by their TD peers. However, their responses in the 6th to 10th positions showed lower convergence scores than their TD peers. Children's convergence scores were higher for the slot-filler condition compared to taxonomic in both English and Spanish. The convergence scores also significantly differed across the semantic categories. Conclusion The children with DLD show greater convergence on the typical items generated earlier in their word lists than the items generated later. This pattern of convergence and divergence highlights their strengths and weaknesses in the representation of lexical–semantic knowledge for typical versus less typical items. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8323613

scholarly journals Online Statistical Learning in Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Lukács ◽  
Krisztina Sára Lukics ◽  
Dorottya Dobó
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Combined Use ◽  
Transitional Probabilities ◽  
Online Tests

Purpose: The vulnerability of statistical learning (SL) in developmental language disorder (DLD) has mainly been demonstrated with metacognitive offline measures which give little insight into the more specific nature and timing of learning. Our aims in this study were to test SL in children with and without DLD with both online and offline measures and to compare the efficiency of SL in the visual and acoustic modalities in DLD.Method: We explored SL in school-age children with and without DLD matched on age and sex (n = 36). SL was investigated with the use of acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal segmentation tasks relying on online (reaction times and accuracy) and offline (two-alternative forced choice, 2AFC and production) measures.Results: In online measures, learning was evident in both groups in both the visual and acoustic modalities, while offline measures showed difficulties in DLD. The visual production task showed a significant learning effect in both groups, while the visual two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and the two acoustic offline tasks only showed evidence of learning in the control group. The comparison of learning indices revealed an SL impairment in DLD, which is present in both modalities.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that children with DLD are comparable to typically developing (TD) children in their ability to extract acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal patterns that are cued only by transitional probabilities in online tasks, but they show impairments on metacognitive measures of learning. The pattern of online and offline measures implies that online tests can be more sensitive and valid indices of SL than offline tasks, and the combined use of different measures provides a better picture of learning efficiency, especially in groups where metacognitive tasks are challenging.

scholarly journals Under-resourced or overloaded? Rethinking working memory deficits in developmental language disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel David Jones ◽  
Gert Westermann
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Capacity Limitations ◽  
Speech Representation ◽  
Internal Speech

Dominant theoretical accounts of developmental language disorder (DLD) are unanimous in assuming working memory capacity limitations. In the current report, we present an alternative view: That working memory in DLD is not under-resourced but overloaded due to operating on speech representations with low discriminability. This account is developed through computational simulations involving deep convolutional neural networks trained on spoken word spectrograms in which frequency information is either retained to mimic typical development or degraded to mimic spectral processing deficits identified among children with DLD. We assess not only spoken word recognition accuracy and predictive probability and entropy (i.e., predictive distribution spread), but also use mean-field-theory based manifold analysis to assess; (i) internal speech representation dimensionality, and (ii) classification capacity, a measure of networks’ ability to isolate any given internal speech representation that is used as a proxy for attentional control. We show that instantiating a low-level frequency discrimination deficit results in the formation of internal speech representations with atypically high dimensionality, and that classification capacity is exhausted due to low representation separability. These representation and control deficits underpin not only lower performance accuracy but also greater uncertainty even when making accurate predictions in a simulated spoken word recognition task (i.e., predictive distributions with low maximum probability and high entropy), which replicates the response delays and word finding difficulties often seen in DLD. Overall, these simulations demonstrate an integrated theoretical account of speech representation and processing in DLD in which working memory capacity limitations play no causal role.

scholarly journals Morphosyntactic weaknesses in Developmental Language Disorder: the role of structure and agreement configurations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 909-944 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo MOSCATI ◽  
Luigi RIZZI ◽  
Ilenia VOTTARI ◽  
Anna Maria CHILOSI ◽  
Renata SALVADORINI ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
The Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Structural Distance ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractAgreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

scholarly journals Spoken Word Learning Differences Among Children With Dyslexia, Concomitant Dyslexia and Developmental Language Disorder, and Typical Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Alt ◽  
Shelley Gray ◽  
Tiffany P. Hogan ◽  
Nora Schlesinger ◽  
Nelson Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Word Learning ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Learning Deficits ◽  
Learning Tasks ◽  
Lower Accuracy

Purpose The purpose of our study was to test the hypotheses (a) that children with dyslexia have spoken word learning deficits primarily related to phonology and (b) that children with dyslexia and concomitant developmental language disorder (DLD) have word learning deficits related to both phonology and semantic processing when compared to peers with typical development (TD). Method Second-graders with dyslexia ( n = 82), concomitant dyslexia and DLD (dyslexia + DLD; n = 40), and TD ( n = 167) learned names and semantic features for cartoon monsters in 5 carefully controlled word learning tasks that varied phonological and semantic demands. The computer-based tasks were played in 6 different word learning games. We analyzed results using Bayesian statistics. Results In general, the dyslexia + DLD group showed lower accuracy on tasks compared to the dyslexia and TD groups. As predicted, word learning tasks that taxed phonology revealed deficits in the dyslexia group, although there were some exceptions related to visual complexity. Word learning deficits in the dyslexia + DLD group were present in tasks that taxed phonology, semantic processing, or both. Conclusions The dyslexia + DLD group demonstrated word learning deficits across the range of word learning tasks that tapped phonology and semantic processing, whereas the dyslexia group primarily struggled with the phonological aspects of word learning. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.9807929

Nonword Repetition Skills in Gulf Arabic–Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (11) ◽  
pp. 3700-3713
Author(s):  
Saleh Shaalan
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Processing ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Gulf Arabic ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Phonological Complexity

Purpose This study examined the performance of Gulf Arabic–speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a Gulf Arabic nonword repetition (GA-NWR) test and compared it to their age- and language-matched groups. We also investigated the role of syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity in light of NWR theories. Method A new GA-NWR test was conducted with three groups of Gulf Arabic–speaking children: school-age children with DLD, language-matched controls (LCs), and age-matched controls (ACs). The test consisted of two- and three-syllable words that either had no clusters, medial clusters, final clusters, or medial + final clusters. Results The GA-NWR distinguished between the performance of children with DLD and the LC and AC groups. Results showed significant syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity effects. Differences between the DLD and typically developing groups were seen in two- and three-syllable nonwords; however, when compared on nonwords with no clusters, children with DLD were not significantly different from the LC group. Conclusions The GA-NWR test differentiated between children with DLD and their ACs and LCs. Findings, therefore, support its clinical utility in this variety of Arabic. Results showed that phonological processing factors, such as phonological complexity, may have stronger effects when compared to syllable length effects. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12996812

Do Children With Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) Have Difficulties With Interference Control, Visuospatial Working Memory, and Selective Attention? Developmental Patterns and the Role of Severity and Persistence of DLD

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (9) ◽  
pp. 3036-3050
Author(s):  
Elma Blom ◽  
Tessel Boerma
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Selective Attention ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Visuospatial Working Memory ◽  
Interference Control ◽  
Developmental Patterns ◽  
Search Tasks ◽  
The Impact

Purpose Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have weaknesses in executive functioning (EF), specifically in tasks testing interference control and working memory. It is unknown how EF develops in children with DLD, if EF abilities are related to DLD severity and persistence, and if EF weaknesses expand to selective attention. This study aimed to address these gaps. Method Data from 78 children with DLD and 39 typically developing (TD) children were collected at three times with 1-year intervals. At Time 1, the children were 5 or 6 years old. Flanker, Dot Matrix, and Sky Search tasks tested interference control, visuospatial working memory, and selective attention, respectively. DLD severity was based on children's language ability. DLD persistence was based on stability of the DLD diagnosis. Results Performance on all tasks improved in both groups. TD children outperformed children with DLD on interference control. No differences were found for visuospatial working memory and selective attention. An interference control gap between the DLD and TD groups emerged between Time 1 and Time 2. Severity and persistence of DLD were related to interference control and working memory; the impact on working memory was stronger. Selective attention was unrelated to DLD severity and persistence. Conclusions Age and DLD severity and persistence determine whether or not children with DLD show EF weaknesses. Interference control is most clearly impaired in children with DLD who are 6 years and older. Visuospatial working memory is impaired in children with severe and persistent DLD. Selective attention is spared.

Considering the Language Disorder Label Debate From a School Speech-Language Pathology Lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-54
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Murza ◽  
Barbara J. Ehren
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
Speech Language Pathologist ◽  
School Based ◽  
Language Pathology ◽  
Education Act

Purpose The purpose of this article is to situate the recent language disorder label debate within a school's perspective. As described in two recent The ASHA Leader articles, there is international momentum to change specific language impairment to developmental language disorder . Proponents of this change cite increased public awareness and research funding as part of the rationale. However, it is unclear whether this label debate is worthwhile or even practical for the school-based speech-language pathologist (SLP). A discussion of the benefits and challenges to a shift in language disorder labels is provided. Conclusions Although there are important arguments for consistency in labeling childhood language disorder, the reality of a label change in U.S. schools is hard to imagine. School-based services are driven by eligibility through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which has its own set of labels. There are myriad reasons why advocating for the developmental language disorder label may not be the best use of SLPs' time, perhaps the most important of which is that school SLPs have other urgent priorities.

Narrative Language Markers of Arabic Language Development and Impairment

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 3472-3487
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Rakhlin ◽  
Nan Li ◽  
Abdullah Aljughaiman ◽  
Elena L. Grigorenko
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Standardized Measures ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Specificity And Sensitivity ◽  
Omission Errors

Purpose We examined indices of narrative microstructure as metrics of language development and impairment in Arabic-speaking children. We examined their age sensitivity, correlations with standardized measures, and ability to differentiate children with average language and language impairment. Method We collected story narratives from 177 children (54.2% boys) between 3.08 and 10.92 years old ( M = 6.25, SD = 1.67) divided into six age bands. Each child also received standardized measures of spoken language (Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary, Sentence Imitation, and Pseudoword Repetition). Several narrative indices of microstructure were examined in each age band. Children were divided into (suspected) developmental language disorder and typical language groups using the standardized test scores and compared on the narrative indicators. Sensitivity and specificity of the narrative indicators that showed group differences were calculated. Results The measures that showed age sensitivity included subject omission error rate, number of object clitics, correct use of subject–verb agreement, and mean length of utterance in words. The developmental language disorder group scored higher on subject omission errors (Cohen's d = 0.55) and lower on correct use of subject–verb agreement (Cohen's d = 0.48) than the typical language group. The threshold for impaired performance with the highest combination of specificity and sensitivity was 35th percentile. Conclusions Several indices of narrative microstructure appear to be valid metrics for documenting language development in children acquiring Gulf Arabic. Subject omission errors and correct use of subject–verb agreement differentiate children with typical and atypical levels of language development.

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