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This article examines in detail the relationship between language and learning disorders in children of school age and the behavioral characteristics of children with language and learning disabilities. Guidelines are offered for screening for identification of language disorders and for differential diagnosis.
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The number of individuals who are homeless is rising, particularly among families (typically mothers) with preschool children. This study examined the speech-language abilities of 25 mothers and their preschool children residing in urban homeless shelters. Results of standardized testing revealed that the majority of the mothers and their preschool children presented with overall language deficits or delays which were present in at least 1 of 4 language modalities: auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading, and writing. Clinical and research implications of these results for both the mothers and their children are discussed.
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.
This study compared several discourse characteristics of linguistically normal and language-disordered children. In order to examine interactive skills, several types of request-response sequences were considered. These included choice questions, product questions, request for clarification, and the responses elicited by these speech acts. While neither the linguistically normal nor the language-disordered groups had achieved an adult level of competence, normal children were much more aware of the interactive nature of discourse than language-disordered children. Normals most often responded within the boundaries of an acceptable adult response. Language-disordered children frequently ignored and responded inappropriately to requests. Their responses were occasionally contrary to fact or totally unrelated to the expected information. Some language-disordered subjects also demonstrated linguistic strategies that facilitated the flow of conversation, but showed no understanding of the content of the communicative interchange. The clinical implications of these findings and the need for further research are discussed.
Mother's discourse adjustments addressed to language-impaired children and non-language-impaired children were studied. Mother-child dyads with 14 language-impaired children and 14 MLU-matched non-language-impaired children served as subjects. The mothers' discourse was compared on the following measures: meaning illocutions, cohesion ilocutions, and dialogue participation. The children's participation in dialogue was also analyzed. Results indicated that the mothers' speech addressed to the two groups of children was highly similar, but the discourse performance of the language-impaired children was not like that of the non-language-impaired children. The clinical implications of these findings for the language-impaired population are discussed.
The untrained /s/ productions of a phonologically disordered child were followed over a period of several months as she produced /s/ in imitated words and in spontaneous connected speech. For this child, as has been reported in the literature for children acquiring phonology normally, /s/ occurred earliest in the word-final position, appearing in word-initial position only several weeks later. Two word-medial, or intervocalic, contexts were compared: (a) monomorphemic words in which /s/ is word- and morpheme-medial (e.g., lasso); and (b) bimorphemic words in which /s/ is word-medial but morpheme-final (e.g., missing). In this latter group, a grammatical inflection or morpheme was added to a morpheme that ends with /s/. Correct responses to the intervocalic position where /s/ occurred at a morpheme boundary (i.e., in inflected morphemes) occurred earlier and more frequently than responses to single-morpheme intervocalic position. The variability of the child's productions over time is examined and discussed.
The present study examined the pragmatic role of a frequently repeated utterance, "it's gone," within the multiple context conversational interactions of a 4-year-old specifically language-impaired boy. The data indicate that the phrase was an interactive access strategy to engage his partners in a nonexistence/disappearance game, a frequent type of early mother-child interaction. The assessment and intervention implications of these data are discussed.
This paper presents a detailed examination of an unusual phonologic pattern reflected in the speech of a language-impaired child. The most salient characteristic of this child's speech was the use of [s] in final position of all words except those containing final oral or nasal bilabials. Her pattern seemed best described as reflecting only two canonical forms for word production, CVC and CVCVC, and a dominant word-final category possessing a family resemblance structure with [s] as the prototype. Training was instituted to increase the number of appropriate categories in the child's phonologic system. Training on word-final [f] and [d] was successful. However, training on [d] seemed to result in the creation of a second category with family resemblance structure. The clinical and theoretical implications of this child's phonologic pattern are discussed.
Ten children with a history of prematurity and respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) were matched with 10 full-term controls on the single-word stage of language. Eleven dependent variables probed for qualitative differences between the groups. Measures of receptive language were based on two assessment procedures specifically designed for this study. Expressive language measures were taken from a parent-elicited language sample. Control subjects demonstrated superior performance on all receptive language and child verbosity measures despite their younger age.
This study investigated the effects of verbal imitation on the comprehension of novel object-location responses and subsequent transfer of these responses to production. A matrix training procedure was used to teach 2 children with moderate mental retardation syntactic rules for combining known and unknown words into two-word utterances. An alternating treatments design was used with two conditions: receptive teaching with imitation of the target phrase and no imitation of the phrase. Findings suggested that the use of imitation facilitated both generalized receptive learning and transfer to production in both subjects.
Voicing is a phonological contrast which emerges early in the speech of children. However, the acoustic correlates of the voicing contrast for stop consonants are fairly complex. In the initial position, voicing is cued primarily by the relative timing of articulatory versus laryngeal gestures. In the final position, the duration of the preceding vowel is associated with the voicing contrast of stop consonants. The purpose of this study was to examine the pattern of acquisition of the voicing contrast in the speech of ten children diagnosed as language-delayed in comparison with the acquisition of the voicing contrast by normal speaking children. The language-delayed and normal-speaking children were matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU) and placed in one of Brown's five developmental stages. Each participant was first given a short test, using natural speech, to determine his or her ability to identify minimal pairs differing in the voicing of stop consonants. Those who passed the test were recorded under standard recording conditions repeating 12 test words. The test words contrasted voiced and voiceless stop consonants in initial and final positions. Spectrograms of the three best productions of each word were used to examine voice-onset time for stops in initial position and preceding vowel duration for stops in final position. Although the language-delayed and normal-speaking children showed equivalent linguistic sophistication (as measured by MLU), the language-delayed children's control of the acoustic-phonetic details of the voicing contrast was less mature than that of the normal-speaking children.
Time of language onset and frequencies of speech and language problems were examined in stutterers and their nonstuttering siblings. These families were grouped according to six characteristics of the index stutterer: sex, recovery or persistence of stuttering, and positive or negative family history of stuttering. Stutterers and their nonstuttering same-sex siblings were found to be distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Comparisons of six subgroups of stutterers and their respective nonstuttering siblings showed no significant differences in the number of their reported articulation problems. Stutterers who were reported to be late talkers did not differ from their nonstuttering siblings in the frequency of their articulation problems, but these two groups had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings.
The current study, which is a follow-up on the epidemiological Nijmegen Otitis Media study, examines the relationship between early otitis media with effusion (OME) and later language ability in a group of children with systematically documented bilateral OME. In the Nijmegen Otitis Media study, children were screened using tympanometry at regular intervals of 3 months, between their second and fourth birthdays. At age 7, three groups of children participated in language testing: 82 OME-free children, 151 children with early bilateral OME, and 37 children treated with ventilation tubes at preschool age. A history of OME, even up to nine instances, did not have negative consequences for language performance at age 7. Intermittent, as opposed to more continuous, OME was not found to affect language ability negatively. The suggested benefit of treatment with ventilation tubes was not found.
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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.
This study explores the hypothesis that there may be particular difficulties for secondary school students with specific developmental language disorder (SDLD) in understanding contextual, pragmatic meaning. Sixty-four SDLD students aged 11+ to 14+ years are compared with chronological-age-matched and language-age-matched non-impaired students. New procedures are used to examine comprehension of two types of ambiguity where the context determines speaker intention: inconsistent messages of emotion and multiple meanings in context. These types of ambiguity are evident in a range of communicative intent, e.g. sarcasm, idiomatic expression, deceit and humour. Preliminary study into adolescent language suggests that at this age there is a growing expectation for students to understand these kinds of communication, both in the classroom and socially. The study finds that the SDLD students were less able than both comparison groups to use context to understand implied meanings. Non-impaired children were also more able to rule out literal interpretations when they did not know the non-literal meaning. These findings were statistically significant. The implications for research and practice are discussed, including those of diagnostic assessment, in the light of the literature survey revealing that many currently available do not assess pragmatic meaning comprehension. There is a challenge to the view that disorders in the semantic and pragmatic domains necessarily co-occur, as suggested by the diagnostic category semantic-pragmatic disorder.
The study focuses on two elicitation methods for language sampling in children with language impairment: conversation and narration. It has been noted in other studies on different clinical groups that language elicited in different speaking contexts varies in aspects such as MLU, fluency and syntactic complexity. The purpose of this study was to compare genre effects on different aspects of language production in a group of pre-school children with language impairment. The results show that there are differences in language production during conversation compared with narration. Intelligibility and fluency were found to be higher in conversation than in narration, whereas MLU in words was higher in narration. The narrative task elicited more phrasal expansions and grammatical morphemes per utterance than the conversation. However, the children used more complex verb forms in conversation than in narration. The results are discussed in relation to recent research.