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PubMed1984

Speech versus sign comprehension in autistic children: analysis and prediction.

Autistic children have severe problems in acquiring language. For this reason, special techniques have been developed to teach them speech and sign language. It is not known, however, whether these children will profit more from speech or sign training. The research literature implies that verbal imitative ability may predict language learning characteristics particularly in the speech modality. In view of this possibility, two groups of autistic children--good versus poor verbal imitators--were studied within the context of a receptive label acquisition task. Good imitators acquired receptive speech whereas poor imitators typically did not. Both groups acquired receptive signs. The results were discussed in terms of the role that imitative ability may play with respect to language acquisition in this population.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1979

Adapted melodic intonation therapy: a case study of an experimental language program for an autistic child.

In order to develop a useful communication system, a 3-year-old, non-verbal autistic boy was treated for 1 year with a Simultaneous Communication method involving signed and verbal language. As this procedure proved not useful in this case, an adaptation of Melodic Intonation Therapy (signing plus an intoned rather than spoken verbal stimulus) was tried. With this experimental language treatment, the patient produced trained, imitative and, finally, spontaneous intoned verbalizations which generalized to a variety of situations.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1999

Do deaf people see better? Texture segmentation and visual search compensate in adult but not in juvenile subjects.

The research concerning the visual perception in deaf subjects has led to contradictory results: Deaf subjects have been reported to show enhanced visual perceptual skills compared to hearing subjects (Neville & Lawson, 1987). On the other hand, there are indications that acoustic deprivation may produce an inferiority in all sensory modalities (Myklebust, 1964). These contradictions may be due to methodological differences: The investigators selected different conditions (e.g. attentive/nonattentive) and various samples of deaf subjects (e.g., different age, language, and aetiology groups). In our study, we tested a large sample of deaf subjects with texture segmentation and visual search conditions, which allowed us to differentiate between visual processing with and without attentional load. All deaf subjects had profound hearing loss within the first year of life. Our results suggest that the visual processing capacity of deaf children and adolescents does not exceed that of age- and gender-matched hearing subjects. Rather, deaf school children show deficits in visual processing in conditions with and without attentional load. Age (6 to 20 years), language used (oral, sign, oral + sign), and aetiology for deafness (genetic, maternal rubella, perinatal, infection in the first year of life, unknown) did not consistently influence the results. The deficits in visual processing were partially compensated for in adult deaf subjects. The performances of deaf and hearing adults in trials that could be solved preattentively did not differ statistically significantly, but in attention-dependent trials the deaf subjects were more efficient than the hearing controls. We conclude that visual compensation for deafness is limited to attention-dependent tasks and does not develop until adulthood.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1980

Planning an initial expressive sign lexicon for persons with severe communication impairment.

Selecting an initial sign lexicon for an individual requires far more than simply making a list of useful words or translating a spoken lexicon into signs through use of a sign dictionary. It requires knowledge of child language acquisition, knowledge of manual signs and linguistic constraints on their use, and knowledge of the needs and desires of the individual for whom the lexicon is intended. Suggestions of writers such as Holland (1975) and Lahey and Bloom (1977) are studied in terms of their appropriateness for visual-manual communication and are applied to approximately 50 signs most frequently taught to retarded and autistic persons (Fristoe and Lloyd, 1979a) to aid in lexicon planning. Additional signs are proposed for extending this basic list. The resulting sample lexicon is evaluated against the suggestions of Holland and of Lahey and Bloom. Rationales given for determining these selections, deletions, and additions can be applied to modify this initial lexicon to make it better suited for a specific individual.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1994

Effects of early manual instruction on the oral-language development of two deaf children.

The speech and language training provided to deaf children at our clinic is done by the Kanazawa Method, which consists of reception and expression training in sign communication and auditory/oral language, as well as written-language training. In our investigation, we analyzed the acquisition of passive and active vocabulary in sign and oral language. The subjects were two children congenitally deaf at the 105 dB level or greater. Recorded-language samples through the age of 54 months were analyzed. Acquisition of sign occurred more quickly than oral-language acquisition. The children's production of active nouns, function words, and "wh-" question words in sign was equivalent to that of hearing peers, and later this proficiency transferred to oral language. These results suggest that early presentation of sign is effective in the acquisition of function words and interrogative sentences, both of which are especially challenging for the Deaf.

Child Development↗
PubMed2002

Effects of parental style of interaction on language development in very young severe and profound deaf children.

AIMS: (1) To study the influence of different styles of parent-child interaction in the language development of very young deaf children. (2) To find out if there are differences in parent-child interaction between two groups of very young deaf children following an Aural/Oral or a Bilingual approach to education. METHODS: Subjects were selected from all deaf children in the County of Avon who were under 3 years of age at the time of first assessment, had severe or profound, bilateral, sensorineural hearing loss and no associated medical problems. There were 16 children and families at the start of the project but only 13 completed all the assessments. The Bristol Language Developmental Scales (BLADES) was used to assess both sign and spoken language development. Interaction was studied through analysis of contingency and book-reading applied to selected periods of 3 min from four videorecorded sessions, taken at 3 months intervals for a period of 1 year. RESULTS: From the 13 children studied, only seven presented with some degree of expressive language measurable by the BLADES. Analysis of contingency showed that parents present with higher percentage of both Direct Related Acts and ON then their children Acts (On Acts: where both individuals are involved in the same task). Regarding bookreading, it was observed that parents often attend to child initiatives and acknowledge most of them but they make little effort to expand or use the child's message as topic for further conversation. In the reduced sample of seven children with expressive language, those with better language development had parents with: (a) higher percentage of DR acts; (b) higher percentage of ON acts; (c) higher percentage of appropriate responses to child communicative initiatives. CONCLUSIONS: In this small group language development seems to be facilitated by encouraging child participation and using a more contingent and child centred interaction. No significant differences were found between oral and bilingual families in terms of quality of interaction.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1990

Parents' use of Signing Exact English: a descriptive analysis.

Parental use of simultaneous communication is advocated by many programs serving hearing-impaired students. The purpose of the present study was to describe in detail the input characteristics of five hearing parents, who were attempting to use one such system, Signing Exact English or SEE 2 (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1980). The parents were intermediate-level signers, motivated to use SEE 2. Voiced and signed segments from videotaped language samples were transcribed and coded for equivalence and other features of interest. Results were that parents' signed mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) were lower than those of their children although the majority of their sign utterances were syntactically intact. Structures categorized as complex in the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure (Lee, 1974) and considered abstract in a semantic coding scheme (Lahey, 1988) were seldom used by the parents. Parents provided a narrow range of lexical items in their sign code. Results are discussed in terms of the type of input the parents are providing and the procedures used to identify priorties for parent education.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1993

Language disorder--James: a case history.

When James was born he seemed the perfect baby. But gradually Venetia Young became concerned about his slow development. Despite repeated reassurance from health professionals, including her health visitor, she persisted in seeking medical opinion and finally learned that James had a language disorder. Here she describes his early years, the warning signs of his language problem and her battle against the experts' disbelief.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2005

Sign and speech: amodal commonality in left hemisphere dominance for comprehension of sentences.

The neural basis of functional lateralization in language processing is a fundamental issue in systems neuroscience. We used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine hemispheric dominance during the processing of signed and spoken sentences. By using tasks involving comprehension of sentences (Sc) and sentential non-word detection (Sn), we compared different groups and stimulus conditions. Under the sign condition with sentence stimuli in Japanese Sign Language (JSL), we tested two groups of subjects: Deaf signers (Deaf) of JSL, and hearing bilinguals (children of Deaf adults, CODA) of JSL and Japanese (JPN). Under the speech condition, we tested hearing monolinguals (Mono) of JPN with auditory JPN stimuli alone (AUD), or with an audiovisual presentation of JPN and JSL stimuli (A&V). We found that the overall bilateral activation patterns under the four experimental conditions of Deaf, CODA, AUD and A&V were almost identical, despite differences in stimuli (JSL and JPN) and groups (Deaf, CODA and Mono). Moreover, consistently left-dominant activations involving frontal and temporo-parietal regions were observed across all four conditions. Furthermore, irrespective of the modalities of sign and speech, the main effects of task (Sc-Sn) were found primarily in the left regions: the ventral part of the inferior frontal gyrus (F3t/F3O), the precentral sulcus, the superior frontal gyrus, the middle temporal gyrus, the angular gyrus and the inferior parietal gyrus. Among these regions, only the left F3t/F3O showed no main effects of modality condition. These results demonstrate amodal commonality in the functional dominance of the left cortical regions for comprehension of sentences, as well as the essential and universal role of the left F3t/F3O in processing linguistic information from both signed and spoken sentences.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1995

Language preference and communication development of a hearing and deaf twin pair.

This observational study examined the development and use of communication in a pair of deaf and hearing monozygotic twins from 13 months of age until 36 months of age. One twin contracted meningitis at 7 months, leaving her profoundly deaf but without other measurable sequelae. The other twin is normal in all respects. The prelingual twins were enrolled in a total communication preschool program where, with their parents, they participated in activities designed to enhance the language skills of deaf children. The twins were videotaped monthly, first at their preschool program and later at home. All forms of communication were recorded, including signs, vocalizations, and hand and body gestures. Additionally, eye gaze direction and body positions during communication were noted. Comparisons between the deaf and hearing twins showed that although both children were able to learn language and communicate successfully, the hearing twin preferred a vocal form of language, whereas the deaf twin used mostly sign language. Moreover, the hearing twin's communication was usually responsive, while the deaf twin's communication was comprised mostly of imitative signs and gestures. Methods of teaching a profoundly deaf child to communicate are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1992

Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?

Sociolinguists have investigated language mixing as code-switching in the speech of bilingual children three years old and older. Language mixing by bilingual two-year-olds, however, has generally been interpreted in the child language literature as a sign of the child's lack of language differentiation. The present study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two-year-old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. Monthly recordings of the child's spontaneous speech in interactions with her parents were made from the age of 2;0 to 2;7. An investigation into the formal aspects of the child's mixing and the context of the mixing reveals that she does differentiate her language use in contextually sensitive ways, hence that she can code-switch. This investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children.

Attention↗
PubMed2004

Classic signs in uroradiology.

The language of radiology is rich with descriptions of imaging findings, often metaphorical, which have found common usage in the day-to-day practice of genitourinary radiology. These "classic signs" give us confidence in our diagnosis. Some of the signs have become so familiar to us that they are referred to as an "Aunt Minnie." When the sign is invoked, or an Aunt Minnie is recognized, it often brings an impression of the image to mind, and it may have specific diagnostic and pathologic implications. The article uses classic signs accumulated from the literature to review a variety of pathologic conditions in the urinary tract.

Humans↗
PubMed2002

Age and language skills of deaf children in relation to theory of mind development.

Using four traditional false-belief tasks, I investigated deaf children's age and expressive language skills in relation to their theory of mind development. The children's parents who signed reported on their own knowledge of a mental sign vocabulary. The results indicate age of the child to be strongly related to theory of mind development. Deaf children demonstrated an ability to pass the theory of mind assessment battery between the ages of 7 and 8 years, on average. In comparison, hearing children have consistently demonstrated the ability to perform such tasks between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Therefore, the results indicate deaf children are delayed by approximately 3 years in this cognitive developmental milestone. Expressive language skills of the children and sign language skills of the parents who signed were not found to be significantly related to the children's theory of mind development.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Reliability of speech-language pathologist and otolaryngologist ratings of laryngeal signs of reflux in an asymptomatic population using the reflux finding score.

OBJECTIVE: To determine inter- and intrajudge agreement in rating signs of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) under "ideal" conditions: Experienced coworkers in a practice devoted to voice-disordered patients, raters trained in the items on a standardized scale, raters from both speech-language pathology (SLP) and otolaryngology, and raters of asymptomatic participants. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective study using a scale to rate videolaryngoscopic examinations. METHODS: Two SLPs and two otolaryngologists used the Reflux Finding Scale (RFS) to independently rate videotapes of endoscopic examinations for 30 participants asymptomatic of reflux. RESULTS: Thirteen (43%) were assigned a total score >7, indicative of LPR, by at least one rater. Intraclass correlation coefficients showed a significant lack of agreement in total scores provided by the otolaryngologists and by all raters combined. One otolaryngologist and the two SLPs demonstrated good interrater agreement in total scores. McNamar's statistic and Poisson regression modeling showed differences in rater agreement for many individual items. Repeated ratings of four participants showed no significant differences, indicating good intrarater reliability. CONCLUSIONS: Level of rater agreement regarding the presence and the severity of physical findings attributed to LPR within and between otolaryngologists and SLPs differed. Given the role each profession plays in the diagnosis and treatment of LPR and related voice disturbances, higher levels of interprofessional agreement are desired. Results support the need for greater consensus among professionals regarding the discreet features of physical findings associated with LPR, a fuller understanding of normal variants, and greater emphasis on interrater reliability when rating physical findings.

Adult↗