scholarly journals Comprehension of novel metaphor in young children with Developmental Language Disorder

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 239694151881722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Bühler ◽  
Alexandra Perovic ◽  
Nausicaa Pouscoulous
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Metaphor Comprehension ◽  
Core Deficit ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
Everyday Communication

Background and aims Difficulties with aspects of morphosyntax, phonology and/or vocabulary are the hallmark of Development Language Disorder (DLD). Yet, little is known about the linguistic-pragmatic abilities of young children with DLD. Previous studies suggest that children with DLD are experiencing difficulties with idioms, sayings and slang expressions, often interpreting them in a literal or unconventional fashion. However, it is unclear whether this is caused by difficulties to make pragmatic inferences in general or whether it stems from their semantic abilities. We therefore investigated novel metaphor understanding in young children with and without DLD. Methods We assessed novel metaphor comprehension using a reference assignment task with 15 children with DLD diagnoses (ages 42–49 months) as well as typically developing peers matched on chronological age (n = 15) and on language (n = 15). Results Children with DLD performed worse than their age-matched peers but in a comparable manner to the (younger) language-matched typically developing children. Performance was not related to non-verbal intelligence in the children with DLD. Conclusion The findings indicate that young children with DLD have difficulties with metaphor comprehension but also suggest that these difficulties are in line with their general language difficulties and linked to their overall linguistic competence rather than reflecting additional specific issues with deriving pragmatic inferences. Implications Our study adds to a growing body of literature showing that children with low language abilities are also likely to display more difficulties in understanding figurative language independently of any other symptomatology of their clinical diagnosis. It also supports the argument that deficits in the pragmatic domain are a secondary impairment rather than a core deficit in children with DLD. Nonetheless, children with DLD do show difficulties in understanding metaphors. Understanding figurative language is necessary for everyday communication and should therefore be targeted alongside traditional treatments by clinicians treating children with DLD.

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 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.

scholarly journals Altered Metabolism of Mothers of Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Control Study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Hollowood-Jones ◽  
James B. Adams ◽  
Devon M. Coleman ◽  
Sivapriya Ramamoorthy ◽  
Stephan Melnyk ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Conjugated Molecules ◽  
Metabolic Analysis ◽  
Transsulfuration Pathway ◽  
Young Children With Autism ◽  
One Carbon Metabolism

Abstract Background: Previous research studies have demonstrated abnormalities in the metabolism of mothers of young children with autism.Method: Metabolic analysis was performed on blood samples from 30 mothers of young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD-M) and from 29 mothers of young typically-developing children (TD-M). Targeted metabolic analysis focusing on the folate one-carbon metabolism (FOCM) and the transsulfuration pathway (TS) as well as broad metabolic analysis were performed. Statistical analysis of the data involved both univariate and multivariate statistical methods.Results: Univariate analysis revealed significant differences in 5 metabolites from the folate one-carbon metabolism and the transsulfuration pathway and differences in an additional 48 metabolites identified by broad metabolic analysis, including lower levels of many carnitine-conjugated molecules. Multivariate analysis with leave-one-out cross-validation allowed classification of samples as belonging to one of the two groups of mothers with 93% sensitivity and 97% specificity with five metabolites. Furthermore, each of these five metabolites correlated with 8-15 other metabolites indicating that there are five clusters of correlated metabolites. In fact, all but 5 of the 50 metabolites with the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve were associated with the five identified groups. Many of the abnormalities appear linked to low levels of folate, vitamin B12, and carnitine-conjugated molecules.Conclusions: Mothers of children with ASD have many significantly different metabolite levels compared to mothers of typically developing children at 2-5 years after birth.

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.

Language Influences on Verbal Short-Term Memory Performance in Down Syndrome

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1334-1346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Brock ◽  
Christopher Jarrold
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Term Memory

Down syndrome is associated with severe deficits in language and verbal short-term memory, but the causal relationship between these deficits is unclear. The current study therefore investigated the influence of language abilities on verbal short-term memory performance in Down syndrome. Twenty-one individuals with Down syndrome and 29 younger typically developing children were tested on memory for words and nonwords using 2 immediate recognition tasks: an order memory task that was a relatively pure measure of verbal short-term memory and an item memory task that was more sensitive to language ability. Despite having superior vocabulary knowledge to the typically developing children, individuals with Down syndrome were impaired on both order and item tasks. This impairment was particularly marked on the item task, where individuals with Down syndrome showed an atypically large lexicality effect. These results are interpreted in terms of an underlying verbal short-term memory deficit in Down syndrome that is compounded by poor phonological discrimination abilities.

Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
THIERRY NAZZI ◽  
ALISON GOPNIK ◽  
ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Chance Level ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Object Selection ◽  
Object Categories

The present study investigates whether five-to-six-year-old children with Williams syndrome (N=8) can form new object categories based on naming information alone, and compares them with five groups of typically developing children aged 2;0 to 6;0 (N=34 children). Children were presented with triads of dissimilar objects; all objects in a triad were labelled, two of them with the same pseudoname. Name-based categorization was evaluated through object selection. Performance was above chance level for all groups. Performance reached a ceiling at about 4;0 for the typically developing children. For the children with Williams Syndrome, performance remained below chronological age level. The present results are discussed in light of previous findings of a failure to perform name-based categorization in younger children with Williams syndrome and the persistent asynchrony between cognitive and lexical development in this disorder.

The Westmead Post-Traumatic Amnesia Scale for Children (WPTAS-C) Aged 4 and 5 Years Old

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonella Rocca ◽  
Margaret Wallen ◽  
Jennifer Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Test Period ◽  
Kindergarten Children ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Posttraumatic Amnesia ◽  
Traumatic Amnesia ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
Clinical Populations ◽  
Familiar Objects

AbstractAssessment of posttraumatic amnesia (PTA) in young children remains problematic. This article details a version of the Westmead PTA Scale, which was adapted for use with children aged 4 and 5 years, and an evaluation of this scale with typically developing children. The Westmead PTA Scale for Children (WPTAS-C) comprises 2 orientation and 4 memory questions, including 2 items involving remembering pictures of familiar objects. Participants included 55 preschool and kindergarten children aged 4 and 5 years. The scale was administered for 4 consecutive days. Ninety-three per cent of the children achieved a score of 6 out 6 for the final 3 days of the 4-day test period. It is concluded that the WPTAS-C is an appropriate measure of orientation and continuous memory in 4- and 5-year-old typically developing children. Validation of the scale in clinical populations is recommended.

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