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PubMedDate not supplied

Methodological adaptations for investigating the perceptions of language-impaired adolescents regarding the relative importance of selected communication skills.

This article describes the systematic and detailed processes undertaken to modify a research methodology for use with language-impaired adolescents. The original methodology had been used previously with normally achieving adolescents and speech pathologists to obtain their opinions about the relative importance of selected communication skills for adolescents' positive peer relationships. Modifications attempted to address language-impaired adolescents' characteristic metalinguistic, literacy, cognitive, and information processing weaknesses. Revising the original wording of the communication skills, reducing the reading level of the skills from grade 10 to 4.6, using a Q-sort approach to ranking the importance of the skills, and revising the instructions and administration procedures led to what pilot testing results indicated was a valid methodology for use with language-impaired adolescents. Results of a preliminary study using the revised methodology suggested that language-impaired adolescents may perceive the relative importance of some communication skills differently from their normally achieving peers.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Qualitative research in literacy acquisition: a framework for investigating reading in children with language impairment.

Although much has been published in the literature concerning literacy in children with language impairments, little is known concerning the process that the individual language-impaired child must go through to become a proficient reader. One reason for this may lie within the focus and rigor dictated by the methodologies typically used in literacy-related studies. This paper addresses some of the limitations of the available literacy literature among language-impaired populations and discusses how recent advances in qualitative research hold potential for significant methodological and clinical contributions to our understanding of literacy, specifically reading. A case study is presented demonstrating the usefulness of this methodological approach to describing the process of reading acquisition in a language-impaired child.

Child↗
PubMed2006

Concomitant use of the matrix strategy and the mand-model procedure in teaching graphic symbol combinations.

Matrix strategies employing parts of speech arranged in systematic language matrices and milieu language teaching strategies have been successfully used to teach word combining skills to children who have cognitive disabilities and some functional speech. The present study investigated the acquisition and generalized production of two-term semantic relationships in a new population using new types of symbols. Three children with cognitive disabilities and little or no functional speech were taught to combine graphic symbols. The matrix strategy and the mand-model procedure were used concomitantly as intervention procedures. A multiple probe design across sets of action-object combinations with generalization probes of untrained combinations was used to teach the production of graphic symbol combinations. Results indicated that two of the three children learned the early syntactic-semantic rule of combining action-object symbols and demonstrated generalization to untrained action-object combinations and generalization across trainers. The results and future directions for research are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed2006

Use of aided language stimulation to improve syntactic performance during a weeklong intervention program.

This pilot study assessed the performance of nine children, aged 4;8-14;5, who used augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems before and after a weeklong aided language stimulation intervention program. Pre/post test data were analyzed to evaluate the participants' syntactic complexity when using (a) a manual communication board and (b) a dynamic display speech generating device (DD-SGD). Results indicate that most participants improved their syntactic performance and that these gains were more pronounced when the participants used a manual communication board as compared with a DD-SGD. There was considerable individual variation in performance.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Psychosocial aspects of aphasia: speech and language therapists' views on professional practice.

BACKGROUND: Although the psychosocial dimensions of aphasia are relatively well understood, there may be variations in how these effects are managed in routine intervention. Speech and language therapists may hold a variety of views about this dimension of the aphasic experience, and these views may play a role in how intervention is managed.Aims. To survey practitioner views on the pertinence of psychosocial dimensions in the management of the aphasia speaker. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Five hundred and twenty-one speech and language therapists who were members of the British Aphasiology Society were surveyed by questionnaire about their views on the importance and role of psychosocial effects (response rate to questionnaire, 33%). The questionnaire was composed of (i) background details of the participants' work context; (ii) attitude towards preparation for working in this area; (iii) attitude towards the importance of psychosocial effects in the management of aphasia; (iv) perceptions of clinical time devoted to this aspect of management; (v) attitude towards the rated importance of specific dimensions of psychosocial effects; (vi) details of methods used; (vii) an open question asking for further comments. OUTCOME AND RESULTS: Overall, strong agreement was shown about the importance of this aspect of aphasia intervention. Participants who believed that psychosocial aspects were important to overall management of the client also believed that these factors were important to the outcome of the intervention. Quality of life (QOL) was found to be an important dimension in psychosocial function, and premorbid experiences were perceived as affecting the outcome of interventions. A range of methods for working on psychosocial functions were reported. Concerns about managing service delivery in this area were expressed, with variations in reported time spent on this type of intervention. CONCLUSIONS: For this population of participants, the psychosocial dimensions were reported as important to management and outcome from intervention. Although variations in views and reported practice were evident, there were a range of responses, which showed a majority view, and these form the basis of key questions to be examined in further studies.

Anxiety↗
PubMed2005

Pathophysiology of language switching and mixing in an early bilingual child with subcortical aphasia.

Acquired aphasia after circumscribed vascular subcortical lesions has not been reported in bilingual children. We report clinical and neuroimaging findings in an early bilingual boy who incurred equally severe transcortical sensory aphasia in his first language (L1) and second language (L2) after a posterior left thalamic hemorrhage. Following recurrent bleeding of the lesion the aphasic symptoms substantially aggravated. Spontaneous pathological language switching and mixing were found in both languages. Remission of these phenomena was reflected on brain perfusion SPECT revealing improved perfusion in the left frontal lobe and left caudate nucleus. The parallelism between the evolution of language symptoms and the SPECT findings may demonstrate that a subcortical left frontal lobe circuity is crucially involved in language switching and mixing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Acquired dyslexia after stroke in the prereading stage: a single case treatment study with f MRI.

The authors report a treatment study of a child (CK) who suffered a left-hemisphere stroke at age 6.3 years, a few months before beginning school. Despite complete recovery of spoken language abilities, CK failed to acquire written language abilities. Neurolinguistic assessment 2 years after the stroke revealed marked impairments in working memory, deficits in acquiring a sublexical reading strategy, and a very rudimentary orthographic network. Functional imaging demonstrated activation in posterior language areas during reading of familiar words while the attempt to read unfamiliar words activated peri- and contralesional structures of the anterior language areas. It was assumed that despite sufficient neural plasticity, the acquisition of a sublexical reading strategy was prevented by severe working memory deficits. Therefore, a specific treatment intervention was developed, choosing a compensatory strategy for reading remediation. Reading development was monitored over three months before and three months after an intensive training was conducted. Data showed significant gains in reading performance only after the specific intervention. These gains remained stable in a catamnesis 2 years later.

Child↗
PubMed2005

Joined-up working' between early years professionals and speech and language therapists: moving beyond 'normal' roles.

This paper draws on research conducted for the Nuffield Foundation (Mroz et at, 2002) which looked at the knowledge, skills and confidence of early years professionals in relation to young children's speech and language development. Key findings from the project are reported in relation to the efficacy of initial and post-qualification training in preparing professionals for the identification and support of children with communication problems. The discussion centres around early years practitioners' experiences of working with speech and language therapists and the needs which they expressed, both for inter-professional training and for modes of working together.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Language repair via metalinguistic means.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to be deficient in the use of complex sentences. In an attempt to remediate this area of weakness, two groups of such children (mean ages 9;4 and 10;6) received about 55 half-hour sessions of metalinguistic training spread over 12 months. Results showed that the use of complex sentences increased to at least normal levels in the experimental groups, and were significantly improved, at both the written and oral levels, as compared with SLI control groups, which evidenced little change over the same period. Further analysis of the data revealed the striking finding that those children who had the poorest complex sentence usage tended to benefit the most from metalinguistic training. These results are interpreted as support for the hypothesis that metalinguistic training helps to overcome the presumed neurological deficit of the language disordered child by making linguistic rules conscious, and thereby providing a 'metalinguistic bridge' via which information can bypass the damaged area.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Contribution of finger tracing to the recognition of Chinese characters.

Finger tracing is a simulation of the act of writing without the use of pen and paper. It is claimed to help in the processing of Chinese characters, possibly by providing additional motor coding. In this study, blindfolded subjects were equally good at identifying Chinese characters and novel visual stimuli through passive movements made with the index finger of the preferred hand and those made with the last finger of that hand. This suggests that finger tracing provides a relatively high level of coding specific to individual characters, but non-specific to motor effectors. Beginning each stroke from the same location, i.e. removing spatial information, impaired recognition of the familiar characters and the novel nonsense figures. Passively tracing the strokes in a random sequence also impaired recognition of the characters. These results therefore suggest that the beneficial effect of finger tracing on writing or recall of Chinese characters is mediated by sequence and spatial information embedded in the motor movements, and that proprioceptive channel may play a part in mediating visuo-spatial information. Finger tracing may be a useful strategy for remediation of Chinese language impairments.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Different school placements following language unit attendance: which factors affect language outcome?

The study compared the outcomes of two groups of children who were attending language unit provision at 7 years of age. Of 242 children in the original study, 62 (28%) transferred to mainstream school placements at age 8 years. These children were then closely matched to children still attending language unit provision at this age using measures of non-verbal IQ, expression and comprehension. These two groups of children were compared on outcome at 11 years in the areas of language skill, non-verbal IQ and social behaviour. Teacher/speech-language therapist opinions of placement were also examined as factors affecting outcome. Results show that children who moved to mainstream provision at 8 years were more likely to be attending mainstream at 11 years, although the majority received extra support. No further differences were evident in outcome according to placement type. However, there was a main effect of teacher/therapist opinion on outcome--children whose teachers were not entirely happy with the 8-year placement performed more poorly at 11 years on language measures. There were no differences on any other measures. The findings suggest that follow-on placements for children attending language units need to be more closely in line with teacher's opinions and that more flexibility needs to be evident in school placement policy in order that appropriate educational settings can be arranged.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Imitative production of regular past tense -ed by English-speaking children with specific language impairment.

BACKGROUND: Language intervention procedures often involve the speech-language pathologist highlighting or making more salient forms that are problematic for the child with a language impairment. According to limited processing accounts of specific language impairment (SLI), one way to increase the saliency of a form is to manipulate its sentence position. AIMS: The placement of verbs with past tense regular -ed, a morpheme documented to be significantly difficult to acquire for English-speaking children with SLI, was manipulated. Specifically, the accurate production of verbs with regular past tense -ed in the final position of sentences was evaluated in comparison with verbs with regular past tense -ed in the internal sentence position. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Ten English-speaking children with SLI (mean age 5;2) who were variable in the production of the regular past tense -ed morpheme participated in the study. A sentence imitation task that consisted of sentences with the past tense -ed in the sentence internal position, the sentence final position and foil sentences was presented. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Overall, the data suggest that in an imitative context, errors of omission occurred only when regular past tense -ed occurred in the sentence internal position compared with the sentence final position. CONCLUSIONS: The results are consistent with the SA explanation for omitted tense marking in children with SLI and do not support the Extended Optional Infinitive Account. Assessment and intervention of past tense -ed may be improved by manipulating the sentence position of this morpheme.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Resistance of grammatical impairment to computerized comprehension training in children with specific and non-specific language impairments.

BACKGROUND: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. AIMS: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same syntactic structure would lead to consistent and fluent comprehension. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Children with receptive language impairments aged from 8 to 13 years were randomly assigned to three groups: Group S (n = 12) responded to reversible sentences in a computerized game, using speech stimuli with pauses before critical phrases. Group M (n = 12) had the same stimuli acoustically modified to lengthen and amplify dynamic portions of the signal. Group U (n = 9) was an untrained control group. On average, children in groups S and M completed over 1000 training trials, focusing on training comprehension of reversible sentences. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Although responses speeded up over the course of training, and most children performed well above chance, accuracy typically remained below 95% correct for constructions such as above/below and reversible active/passive. Trained groups did not differ from untrained children on language or auditory outcomes. There was no evidence that acoustically modified speech input enhanced comprehension. CONCLUSIONS: Rote training of comprehension of reversible sentences does not seem to be an effective approach to remediating such problems. For most children, the pattern of performance suggested that the problem was not a lack of syntactic knowledge, bur rather limited processing capacity that led to failures of on-line computation of meaning.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Interaction before conflict and conflict resolution in pre-school boys with language impairment.

BACKGROUND: Children with language impairment (LI) experience social difficulties, including conflict management. The factors involved in peer-conflict progression in pre-school children with LI, and which of these processes may differ from pre-school children with typical language development (TL), is therefore examined. AIMS: To describe the relationship between opponents interacting before conflict, aberrant conflict causes, the conflict-resolution strategy reconciliation (i.e. friendly contact between former opponents shortly following conflict termination), and conflict outcome in the form of social interaction after a conflict has run its course. It is hypothesized that without social interaction before conflict, children with LI will experience increased difficulties attaining reconciliation. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Unstructured play of 11 boys with LI (4-7 years old), at a specialized language pre-school, and 20 boys with TL (4-6 years old), at mainstream pre-schools, were video filmed. Conflicts were identified and recorded according to a validated coding system. Recorded conflict details include social interaction between conflict in the pre-conflict period, behavioural sequences constituting conflict cause (conflict period), reconciliatory behaviours in the post-conflict period, and social interaction between former opponents in the succeeding non-conflict period. The group's mean proportion of individual children's conflicts in which specific behavioural sequences occurred were calculated and compared between and within the groups. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: When conflicts with and without pre-conflict social interaction were analysed separately, aberrant caused conflicts occurred more often in LI group conflicts than in TL group conflicts. However, in conflicts without social interaction in the pre-conflict period, boys with LI exhibit reconciliatory behaviours in, and reconcile a comparatively smaller proportion of, conflicts. Social interaction in the succeeding non-conflict period was proportionately less for boys with LI. This appears to stem from lower reconciliation rates in LI conflicts that do not begin with social interaction in the pre-conflict period. It was also confounded by the larger number of aberrant caused LI conflicts that were rarely reconciled. In turn, non-reconciliation and aberrant caused conflicts were independently associated with comparatively less social interaction in the succeeding non-conflict period. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that in addition to traditional psycholinguistic training, children with LI may gain from interventions that support concluding behavioural turns, as in aberrant caused conflicts; and in initiating contact in conflict situations, even when a frame of reference is not immediately available, as was the case when opponents have not established social interaction in the pre-conflict period.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Generalization of early metalinguistic skills in a phonological decoding study with first-graders at risk for reading failure.

This training study was designed to examine the effects of training letter-sound correspondences and phonemic decoding (segmenting and blending skills) on the decoding skills of three first-grade children identified to be at risk for reading failure. This training study was to examine the degree to which the subjects could readily learn decoding skills necessary for early reading and to determine the degree to which phonemic decoding training on CVC syllable structures generalize to untrained syllable structures. Three experimental subjects served as their own controls in a single-subject multiple-baseline design. Experimental subjects were compared to matched control subjects on their ability to decode real-word and pseudo-word stimuli and on formal test scores of reading and spelling. Following training, experimental subjects demonstrated substantial increases in their acquisition and generalization of phonological decoding skills, but revealed much smaller changes on pre-test to post-test measures of formal reading and spelling when compared to their matched control subjects.

Child, Preschool↗