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PubMed2002

Lexical organization and phonological change in treatment.

Word frequency and neighborhood density are properties of lexical organization that differentially influence spoken-word recognition. This study examined whether these same properties also affect spoken-word production, particularly as related to children with functional phonological delays. The hypothesis was that differential generalization would be associated with a word's frequency and its neighborhood density when manipulated as input in phonological treatment. Using a multiple baseline across subjects design, 8 children (aged 3;10 to 5;4) were randomly enrolled in 1 of 4 experimental conditions targeting errored sounds in high-frequency, low-frequency, high-density, or low-density words. Dependent measures were generalization of treated sounds and untreated sounds within and across manner classes as measured during and following treatment. Results supported a hierarchy of phonological generalization by experimental condition. The clinical implications lie in planning for generalization through the input presented in treatment. Theoretically, the results demonstrate that lexical organization of words in the mental lexicon interacts with phonological structure in learning.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Effects of speech and print feedback on spelling by children with autism.

In this systematic replication of a previous study (R. W. Schlosser, D. M. Blischak, P. J. Belfiore, C. Bartley, and N. Barnett, 1998), the effects of speech and print feedback on spelling performance were evaluated. Four children with autism and no functional speech were taught to spell words with a speech-generating device under 3 feedback conditions. In the auditory-visual condition, children received both speech and print feedback, whereas in the auditory and visual conditions, only 1 type of feedback was provided. An adapted alternating treatments design was used. All 4 children reached criterion across conditions. Although 3 children reached criterion first with print or speech-print feedback, 1 child was most efficient with speech-print followed by speech feedback. Based on the findings of both studies, 2 distinct profiles of feedback efficiency are proposed. Children that exemplify the primarily visual profile spell words most efficiently when feedback involves print. Children that fit the auditory profile spell words most efficiently when feedback involves speech. The implications for understanding the learning characteristics of children with autism, as well as those for practice and further research are derived.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed2004

Oral and written story composition skills of children with language impairment.

In this study 538 children composed 1 oral and 1 written fictional story in both 2nd and 4th grades. Each child represented 1 of 4 diagnostic groups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), or low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). The stories of the TL group had more different words, more grammatical complexity, fewer errors, and more overall quality than either language-impaired group at either grade. Stories of the SLI and LNIQ groups were consistently stronger than were those of the NLI group. Kindergarten children with language impairment (LI) whose standardized test performance suggested normalization by 2nd grade also appeared to have recovered in storytelling abilities at that point. By 4th grade, however, these children's stories were less like the children with TL and more like those of children with persistent LI than they had been in 2nd grade. Oral stories were better than written stories in both grades, although the greatest gains from 2nd to 4th grade were generally made on written stories. Girls told stronger stories than did boys at both grades, regardless of group placement. It is concluded that story composition tasks are educationally relevant and should play a significant role in the evaluation of children with developmental LI.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2005

Roles of initiation and responsiveness in access and participation for children with specific language impairment.

This study compared the abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI; n = 10) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 13) to access and participate in an ongoing interaction between two unfamiliar peer partners. Results revealed that all children in the study accessed by either making an unprompted initiation toward their peers (access initiation) or by responding to a question or play invitation directed toward them (access response). However, 4 children with SLI were unsuccessful in achieving successful access initiation during the 10-min play period. Children with SLI required a longer period of time to achieve access initiation. Following access, children with SLI were addressed significantly less by their play partners, participated in less group play, and engaged in more individual play and onlooking behavior. Among the SLI group, language levels were negatively related to the time children required to achieve their first successful access and first access initiation. Expressive language levels were positively related to the percentage of utterances children produced postaccess and the percentage of utterances they were addressed postaccess by their play partners. Differences in receptive skills among SLI children were less strongly related to the time they required in achieving their first access and were unrelated to their ability to participate in the interaction.

Child↗
PubMed2006

Individual differences in the onset of tense marking: a growth-curve analysis.

The purpose of this study was to explore individual differences in children's tense onset growth trajectories and to determine whether any within- or between-child predictors could account for these differences. Twenty-two children with expressive vocabulary abilities in the low-average to below-average range participated. Sixteen children were at risk for specific language impairment (SLI), and 6 children had low-average language abilities. Spontaneous language samples, obtained at 3-month intervals between 2;0 and 3;0, were analyzed to examine change in a cumulative productivity score for 5 tense morphemes: third person singular present, past tense, copula BE, auxiliary BE, and auxiliary DO. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to model intercept and linear growth at 30 months and quadratic growth overall. A growth model that included mean length of utterance (MLU) and MLU growth better explained within-child productivity score growth trajectories than a parallel model with vocabulary and vocabulary growth. Significant linear growth in productivity scores remained even after a control for MLU was in place. When between-child predictors were added in the final conditional model, only positive family history approached statistical significance, improving the overall estimation of the model's growth parameters. The findings support theoretical models of language acquisition that claim relative independence of tense marking from other more general aspects of vocabulary development and sentence length. The trends for family history are also consistent with proposals implicating faulty genetic mechanisms underlying developmental language disorders. Systematic use of familial risk data is recommended in future investigations examining the relationship between late-talking children and children at risk for SLI.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1984

Profiles of communicative and cognitive-social abilities in autistic children.

The purpose of this study was to examine profiles of communicative and cognitive-social abilities in a small group of autistic children functioning in the prelinguistic and early stages of language development and to compare them with those of normal children functioning at similar stages of language development. The results of measures in the cognitive-social areas of communicative intent, tool use, imitation, and play and in language comprehension demonstrated uneven development for the autistic subjects. A functional analysis of communicative behaviors indicated that, despite a wide variation in communicative means, the autistic subjects displayed a relatively homogeneous profile of communicative functions that was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the normal profile. Explanations for the heterochrony in communicative and cognitive-social development of these autistic children are discussed.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1985

Interruptions as a variable in stuttering and disfluency.

Parental verbal behavior is often cited as a major precipitating and maintaining factor in the onset and development of stuttering. Parents are frequently counseled to avoid interrupting their stuttering child. The purpose of the present study was to determine (a) whether mothers of preschool stutterers interrupt children's speech more frequently than mothers of nonstutterers, (b) whether stutterers interrupt the speech of mothers more frequently than nonstutterers, and (c) whether there is relationship between interruptive behavior and the occurrence of children's disfluencies. Twenty-four preschool boys (12 stutterers and 12 nonstutterers) and their mothers participated in the study. Ten-min, conversational speech samples of mothers interacting with their own children, unfamiliar stutterers, and unfamiliar nonstutterers were analyzed. Results indicated that mothers of nonstutterers interrupted the disfluent speech of stutterers significantly more often than did mothers of stutterers. Most importantly, all mothers interrupted children's disfluent speech significantly more than they interrupted children's fluent speech. Further, all children demonstrated a tendency to be disfluent when they interrupted a mother.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1991

Maternal linguistic input to toddlers with slow expressive language development.

Maternal speech styles to children between 20 and 34 months of age who were slow to acquire expressive language were compared to those of mothers with normally speaking toddlers. Aspects of the mothers' speech examined included use of various sentence types (declaratives, negative, questions, etc.); the mother's lexical contingency with regard to the child's utterance; mother's use of pragmatic functions such as requests, comments, and conversational devices; and the mother's use of topic management. Results revealed that mothers of toddlers with slow language development are different from mothers of normal speakers only in their frequency of use of lexical contingency devices, specifically, expansion and extension. However, the proportion of expansions and extensions relative to the number of child utterances is not different, indicating that when late talkers give their mothers something to expand, the mothers do so, but that the late talkers do not give their mothers as much speech to work with as do the normal toddlers. Implications of these findings for parent training are discussed.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1992

Measurable outcomes of instructions to modify normal parent-child verbal interactions: implications for indirect stuttering therapy.

This study was a preliminary analysis of the differential effects of instructions to slow maternal speech rate, or to slow and simplify maternal speech when conversing with normally fluent children. Twenty mothers and their normally fluent children participated. Instructions to slow maternal rate resulted in maternal speech simplification as a by-product. No significant differences were found between the effects of the two sets of instructions. Furthermore, children's speech rate and language complexity did not parallel maternal adjustments. These last findings are problematic for some of the premises that underlie the use of parental counseling as a component of indirect therapy for stuttering.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1992

Young children's idiom comprehension: trying to get the picture.

Young children (3.5-6.5 years of age) were tested for their comprehension of 10 common idioms in context and no-context conditions. Results revealed a significant linear trend for children to make more literal responses with increasing age. Children of this age did not find the story contexts helpful in interpreting the idioms. A range of comprehension scores was found among the individual idioms, but semantic transparency (as judged by adults) was not related to comprehension. Child-internal and methodologic variables influencing idiom comprehension are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1992

The acquisition of unrounded vowels in English.

This study investigated developmental patterns of acquisition of the unrounded American English vowels /i, I, e, e, ae, a/ by following 6 normally developing children from 22 to 30 months of age. The subjects were examined at approximately 22, 26, and 30 months of age. Results showed that, in general, /i/ and /a/ were mastered early and /I/ and /e/ were least accurate throughout the period of the study. Upon inspection of errors, the following three classes of production errors were identified: (a) intertrial production variability, (b) context-sensitive substitutions, and (c) context-free systematic substitution patterns, or articulatory processes. A decrease in production variability and in the occurrence of articulatory processes with age generally coincided with a gradual improvement in accuracy of production. However, substitutions of lower vowels for /I/ were persistent, and the pattern was observed even at 30 months of age. Individual variation was also evident in the production accuracy, the substitution patterns, and the manner of articulatory improvement.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed1992

Effects of configuration on the paired-associate learning of blissymbols by preschool children with normal cognitive abilities.

Translucency appears to be a potent variable in the learning of Blissymbols by preschool children with normal cognitive abilities. Complexity does not appear to influence learning for these individuals when there is a concurrent condition of high translucency. However, a condition of high complexity seems to enhance the learnability of Blissmbols having low translucency. For the present experiment, an attempt was made to determine if symbol configuration affects the learning of highly complex Blissymbols that bear little relationship to their referents. A paired-associate learning paradigm was used to present 30 Blissymbols to 20 cognitively normal preschool children. These symbols were evenly divided into superimposed and nonsuperimposed groups. Results indicated that the children learned more superimposed symbols than their nonsuperimposed counterparts. The implications of this finding for the teaching of Blissymbols are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1992

Speech perception and production skills of students with impaired hearing from oral and total communication education settings.

This study examined the degree to which students with profoundly impaired hearing who had been educated in oral and total communication (TC) environments developed auditory and speech skills. The sample consisted of 227 16- and 17-year-old students with profoundly impaired hearing: 127 from TC programs (63 with normal-hearing parents and 64 with deaf parents) and 100 from oral programs. Subject groups were matched in terms of age, unaided residual hearing, and IQ. On average, students from oral programs acquired more intelligible speech and made significantly better use of their limited residual hearing than did the TC students. This finding held for all TC students--those with deaf parents as well as those with normal-hearing parents. Although results of this study indicate that auditory and speech production skills are comparatively well developed in students who have consistently used spoken language throughout the day as the primary means of communicating, other factors associated with this oral sample, such as early amplification, consistent hearing aid use, early education, and parental support, may also be necessary for the development of good spoken language skills.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Morphological deficits of children with SLI: evaluation of number marking and agreement.

Three accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with specific language impairment (SLI), that is, Missing Feature, Surface Account, and Missing Agreement, were evaluated by examining children with SLI and language-matched non-SLI children's acquisition of number marking and number agreement. The data consisted of spontaneous language transcripts from 108 preschool children. Number marking was evaluated using five indices of plural development: percent of use in obligatory contexts, lexical productivity, selectivity, contrastivity, and morphological productivity. Two levels of number agreement were examined: the traditional agreement between the verb and its subject, and a new measure of agreement within the noun phrase. The results indicated that children with SLI control number marking, counter to the predictions of the Missing Feature hypothesis and the Surface Account. On the other hand, as predicted, number agreement across clausal boundaries was more difficult for the children with SLI as compared to the children in the control group. A close analysis of number marking within the noun phrase revealed two distinctive contexts, determiner+noun versus quantifier+noun. Children with SLI had more difficulty with the latter than the former, whereas the two contexts were not differentiated for the control children. Syntactic and semantic explanations are discussed as interpretive options.

Child Language↗
PubMed1993

Grammatical morpheme acquisition in 4-year-olds with normal, impaired, and late-developing language.

The production of the grammatical morphemes studied by Brown and his colleagues was examined in free speech samples from a cohort of 4-year-olds with a history of slow expressive language development (SELD) and a control group of normal speakers. Results suggest that children with SELD acquire morphemes in an order very similar to that shown in previous acquisition research. Children who were slow to begin talking at age 2 and who continued to evidence delayed expressive language development by age 4 showed mastery of the four earliest acquired grammatical morphemes, as would be expected, based on their MLUs, which fell at Early Stage IV. Four-year-olds with normal language histories produced all but one of the grammatical morphemes with more than 90% accuracy, as would be expected based on their late Stage V MLUs. Children who were slow to acquire expressive language as toddlers, but who "caught up" in terms of sentence length by age 4 did not differ in MLU from their peers with normal language histories. However, they had acquired fewer of the grammatical morphemes. The implications of these findings for understanding the phenomenon of slow expressive language development are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1994

Generalized effects of enhanced Milieu teaching.

The primary and generalized effects of Enhanced Milieu Teaching were examined with six preschool children with significant language delays. In a multiple baseline design across children, trainers implemented the naturalistic language intervention during play-based interaction sessions in the children's preschool classrooms. Children systematically increased their use of targeted language skills during the intervention sessions, and these changes were maintained when the treatment was discontinued. Generalized changes in children's communication resulting from the intervention were examined with untrained teachers, peers, and parents. Some generalization to untrained partners was observed for all children. Correlational analyses indicated that greater numbers of child utterances and greater diversity in vocabulary were associated with increased talking and mands for verbalization presented by partners.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1995

Metrical patterns of words and production accuracy.

This investigation examined the influence of metrical patterns of words (syllable stress and serial position) on the production accuracy of 20 children (22 to 28 months). The data were productions of six pairs of individualized two-syllable experimental words that referred to unfamiliar objects. Members of each pair differed only in the placement of stress (e.g., ['soti] vs. [so'ti]). Unstressed syllables were much more likely to be omitted, particularly at the beginning of words. Very few stressed syllables and unstressed second position syllables were omitted. One fourth of the word initial unstressed syllables were omitted. Consonant omissions, though few in number, tended to occur in initial position. Assimilation errors were not influenced by stress or serial position. When segmental errors due to syllable omissions were excluded, other consonant errors were not affected by stress or serial position. These findings indicate that young children's productions of syllables are influenced by the metrical patterns of words. However, the trochaic pattern of English is a statistical tendency, not an absolute constraint on two-syllable words. Metrical pattern also does not affect the consonant accuracy in syllables produced.

Child Language↗