scholarly journals Comprehension of Welcher -Questions in German-Speaking Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Anne Dorothée Roesch ◽  
Vasiliki Chondrogianni
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Question Type ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Phonological Working Memory ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
German Speaking

Purpose This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object welcher (“which”)-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also examined whether knowledge of case-marking and/or phonological working memory modulated children's ability to revise early assigned interpretations of ambiguous questions. Method Sixty-three monolingual German-speaking children with and without DLD aged between 4;0 and 5;11 (years;months) participated in an offline picture selection task targeting the comprehension of welcher -questions in German. We manipulated question type (subject, object), case-marking transparency, and case-marking position within the question (sentence-initial/-final). Results The typically developing children outperformed the children with DLD across conditions, and all children performed better on subject than on object wh -questions. Transparent and early cues elicited higher accuracy than late-arriving cues. For the DLD children, their working memory capacity explained their inability to revise early assigned interpretations to ambiguous questions, whereas their knowledge of case did not. Conclusions The results suggest that disambiguating morphosyntactic cues can only partly facilitate comprehension of German welcher -questions in children with DLD, whose poor phonological working memory rather than their knowledge of case-marking mediates performance on these structures.

scholarly journals Lower verbalizability of visual stimuli modulates differences in estimates of working memory capacity between children with and without developmental language disorders

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 239694152094551
Author(s):  
Seçkin Arslan ◽  
Lucie Broc ◽  
Fabien Mathy
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Short Term

Background and aims Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often perform below their typically developing peers on verbal memory tasks. However, the picture is less clear on visual memory tasks. Research has generally shown that visual memory can be facilitated by verbal representations, but few studies have been conducted using visual materials that are not easy to verbalize. Therefore, we attempted to construct non-verbalizable stimuli to investigate the impact of working memory capacity. Method and results We manipulated verbalizability in visual span tasks and tested whether minimizing verbalizability could help reduce visual recall performance differences across children with and without developmental language disorder. Visuals that could be easily verbalized or not were selected based on a pretest with non-developmental language disorder young adults. We tested groups of children with developmental language disorder (N = 23) and their typically developing peers (N = 65) using these high and low verbalizable classes of visual stimuli. The memory span of the children with developmental language disorder varied across the different stimulus conditions, but critically, although their storage capacity for visual information was virtually unimpaired, the children with developmental language disorder still had difficulty in recalling verbalizable images with simple drawings. Also, recalling complex (galaxy) images with low verbalizability proved difficult in both groups of children. An item-based analysis on correctly recalled items showed that higher levels of verbalizability enhanced visual recall in the typically developing children to a greater extent than the children with developmental language disorder. Conclusions and clinical implication: We suggest that visual short-term memory in typically developing children might be mediated with verbal encoding to a larger extent than in children with developmental language disorder, thus leading to poorer performance on visual capacity tasks. Our findings cast doubts on the idea that short-term storage impairments are limited to the verbal domain, but they also challenge the idea that visual tasks are essentially visual. Therefore, our findings suggest to clinicians working with children experiencing developmental language difficulties that visual memory deficits may not necessarily be due to reduced non-verbal skills but may be due to the high amount of verbal cues in visual stimuli, from which they do not benefit in comparison to their peers.

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.

scholarly journals Developmental Language Disorder and Autism: Commonalities and Differences on Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 589
Author(s):  
Natasa Georgiou ◽  
George Spanoudis
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Autism Group ◽  
Developmental Conditions

Language and communication deficits characterize both autism spectrum disorder and developmental language disorder, and the possibility of there being a common profile of these is a matter of tireless debate in the research community. This experimental study addresses the relation of these two developmental conditions in the critical topic of language. Α total of 103 children (79 males, 24 females) participated in the present study. Specifically, the study’s sample consisted of 40 children with autism, 28 children with developmental language disorder, and 35 typically developing children between 6 and 12 years old. All children completed language and cognitive measures. The results showed that there is a subgroup inside the autism group of children who demonstrate language difficulties similar to children with developmental language disorder. Specifically, two different subgroups were derived from the autism group; those with language impairment and those without. Both autism and language-impaired groups scored lower than typically developing children on all language measures indicating a common pathology in language ability. The results of this study shed light on the relation between the two disorders, supporting the assumption of a subgroup with language impairment inside the autism spectrum disorder population. The common picture presented by the two developmental conditions highlights the need for further research in the field.

scholarly journals Gender and agreement processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATALIA RAKHLIN ◽  
SERGEY A. KORNILOV ◽  
ELENA L. GRIGORENKO
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Time ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Phonological Memory ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Feminine Gender

ABSTRACTTwo experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement violations were introduced and the targets varied between words, pseudo-words, or pseudo-words with derivational suffixes. In both experiments, children with DLD did not differ from typically developing children in their reaction time or sensitivity to agreement features. In both groups, trials with feminine gender resulted in a higher error rate. Children with DLD displayed lower overall accuracy, which was related to differences in phonological memory in both experiments. Furthermore, in Experiment 1 group differences were not maintained after phonological memory was entered as a covariate. The results are discussed with respect to various processing and linguistic theories of DLD.

scholarly journals Neuronal Activation for Semantically Reversible Sentences

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 1283-1298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona M. Richardson ◽  
Michael S. C. Thomas ◽  
Cathy J. Price
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Semantic Integration ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Neuronal Activation ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Phonological Working Memory ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
Healthy Participants

Semantically reversible sentences are prone to misinterpretation and take longer for typically developing children and adults to comprehend; they are also particularly problematic for those with language difficulties such as aphasia or Specific Language Impairment. In our study, we used fMRI to compare the processing of semantically reversible and nonreversible sentences in 41 healthy participants to identify how semantic reversibility influences neuronal activation. By including several linguistic and nonlinguistic conditions within our paradigm, we were also able to test whether the processing of semantically reversible sentences places additional load on sentence-specific processing, such as syntactic processing and syntactic-semantic integration, or on phonological working memory. Our results identified increased activation for reversible sentences in a region on the left temporal–parietal boundary, which was also activated when the same group of participants carried out an articulation task which involved saying “one, three” repeatedly. We conclude that the processing of semantically reversible sentences places additional demands on the subarticulation component of phonological working memory.

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 “Sound of Silence”: Sensitivity to Silent Letters in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Marie-Pier Godin ◽  
Rachel Berthiaume ◽  
Daniel Daigle
Keyword(s):  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Orthographic Knowledge ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Morphological Knowledge ◽  
Spelling Instruction ◽  
Silent Letter

Purpose Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate general spelling difficulties. This study investigated accuracy on and sensitivity to silent letters in spelling in children with and without DLD. Investigating silent-letter production provides a window into orthographic and morphological knowledge and enhances understanding of children's spelling skills. Method A group of children with DLD ( M age = 9;11 [years;months]) and two control groups of typically developing children ( n = 30 in each group) were given a dictated spelling task of 44 words that each contained a derivational or a nonderivational silent letter. We coded the silent letter in each word and counted 1 point for each correctly spelled letter in order to examine accuracy on silent letters. Two error patterns were distinguished to analyze sensitivity to silent letters: silent-letter substitutions and silent-letter omissions. Results Repeated-measures ANOVA showed that children with DLD produced significantly more errors on silent letters than did both control groups. Both control groups showed a greater sensitivity to silent-letter endings, as they tended to substitute incorrect silent letters where they made errors. In contrast, children with DLD tended to omit silent letters in their spelling attempts. Conclusions Our results suggest that silent-letter production is a major source of difficulty for spellers, especially for those with DLD, who appear to lack sensitivity to silent letters. These results highlight the importance of promoting spelling instruction to enhance orthographic knowledge in children with DLD.

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.

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