Cognitive state verbs and complement clauses in children with SLI and their typically developing peers

This study investigated the use of cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. In Study 1, conversational samples from 23 children with SLI (M?=?6;2), 24 age-matched TD children (M?=?6;2) and 21 vocabulary-matched TD children (M?=?4;9) were analysed for the proportional use of CSVs, verb types, co-occurrence with complement clauses and syntactic frame types. Children in all three groups had similar performance in all measures. Study 2 compared a subset of children on CSV use in conversational and narrative/expository samples. Conversation elicited more high-frequency verbs, whereas narrative/expository samples elicited more low-frequency verbs. Children with SLI used fewer different verbs and were less likely to combine low-frequency verbs with a complement clause than their TD peers. We conclude that these observed deficits can be attributed to limitations in lexical knowledge rather than a syntactic deficit.     

The use of relative clauses by children with language impairment

Recently, there has been increased attention to the development of complex syntax by children with language disorder. An example is the work of Schuele and Nicholls and Schuele and Tolbert who describe the acquisition of relative clauses by a group of children with SLI. The current paper presents data from 66 children with language impairment, aged 6 to 11 years. Their use of relative clauses is examined in two contexts, an elicitation and a narrative task. Data are presented on the omission of obligatory relative markers, postulated by Schuele and Tolbert as a recognizable stage in development by SLI but not typically developing children. Obligatory marker omission was rare in the current data. A more common pattern was use of the “reduced relative”, described by Schuele and Tolbert as a developmental step prior to the production of full relative clauses. Possible reasons for the discrepancies are considered.     

Insensitivity to verb conjugation patterns in French children with SLI

ABSTRACT

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterised by persistent difficulties that affect language abilities in otherwise normally developing children (Leonard, 2014). It remains challenging to identify young children affected by SLI in French. We tested oral production of the passé composé tense in 19 children in kindergarten and first grade with SLI aged from 5;6 to 7;4 years. All children were schooled in a French environment, but with different linguistic backgrounds. We used an Android application, Jeu de verbes (Marquis et al., 2012), with six verbs in each of four past participle categories (ending in -é, -i, -u, and other irregulars). We compared their results and error types to those of control children (from Marquis, 2012–2014) matched for gender, age, languages spoken at home, and parental education. Results show that children with SLI do not master the passé composé in the same way as typical French children do, at later ages than previously shown in the literature. This task shows potential for oral language screening in French-speaking children in kindergarten and first grade, independently of language background.     

Phonotactic probability and past tense use by children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers

A group of preschool‐aged children with specific language impairment (SLI), a group of typically developing children matched for age (TD‐A), and a group of younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD‐MLU) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that required them to inflect with past tense –ed. The novel verbs differed in their phonotactic probabilities. The children with SLI were less likely than the other two groups to produce the novel verbs with –ed. Furthermore, they were less likely to use –ed with novel verbs of low phonotactic probability than those of high probability; this difference was not seen in the other two groups of children. It appears that the phonotactic composition of verbs is one factor that can contribute to the variability of past tense use by children with SLI.     

Linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narration in Finnish typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

This study investigates narratives of Finnish children with specific language impairment (SLI) from linguistic and pragmatic perspectives, in order to get a comprehensive overview of these children’s narrative abilities. Nineteen children with SLI (mean age 6;1 years) and 19 typically developing age-matched children participated in the study. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for linguistic productivity and complexity, grammatical and referential accuracy, event content, the use of mental state expressions and narrative comprehension. Children with SLI showed difficulties in every aspect of narration in comparison to their peers. Only one measure of productivity, the number of communication units, did not reach statistical significance. Not only was linguistic structure fragile but also pragmatic aspects of storytelling (referencing, event content, mental state expressions and inferencing) were demanding for children with SLI. Results suggest that pragmatic aspects of narration should be taken into account more often when assessing narrative abilities of children with SLI.     

Grammatical case-marking in Japanese children with SLI

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Japanese children with specific language impairment (henceforth; SLI) would in fact experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking. The participants were 10 Japanese children with SLI, aged 7;7 to 11;4, and 25 Japanese children with typical language development (henceforth; TLD), aged 8;11 to 9;11. In this study, a sentence completion task was used, which involved both active and passive sentences with canonical and scrambled word order. The children with SLI were significantly less accurate than those with TLD with the use of grammatical case-markers. Moreover, the majority of the errors that the children with SLI made with case-marking consisted of canonical case-marking patterns. These results suggest that Japanese children with SLI do in fact appear to experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking and furthermore that they seem to rely on canonical case-marking patterns to compensate for their deficits.     

Narrative comprehension and production in children with SLI: An eye movement study

This study investigates narrative comprehension and production in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI (mean age 5;8 years) and 12 typically developing children (mean age 5;6 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate online narrative comprehension and production in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with SLI. The comprehension task involved the recording of eye movements during the visual exploration of successive scenes in a story, while listening to the associated narrative. With regard to production, the children were asked to retell the story, while once again looking at the scenes, as their eye movements were monitored. During narrative production, children with SLI look at the most semantically relevant areas of the scenes fewer times than their age-matched controls, but no differences were found in narrative comprehension. Moreover, the analyses of speech productions revealed that children with SLI retained less information and made more semantic and syntactic errors during retelling. Implications for theories that characterize SLI are discussed.     

An examination of interactions among children with autism and their typically developing peers

Objective: To determine whether pre-school children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) interact differently with their peers with ASD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, across three activities (free play, structured group time and semi-structured play) in an early intervention setting.

Methods: We completed a series of non-experimental case studies involving 13 children with ASD and two TD peers.

Results: We found trends, but no uniform differences, in the frequency or quality of means by which the children with ASD interacted with one another versus with their TD peers across the three contexts. The children with ASD interacted with both peer types more frequently during the semi-structured and structured activities, than during free play.

Conclusions: The children with ASD showed no clear bias towards one peer type over the other. Semi-structured activities may be the best context in which to facilitate peer interactions involving children with ASD in early intervention settings.     

Socio emotional competence in young children with ASD during interaction with their typically developing peers

BackgroundBuilding socio-emotional competence (SEC) is a central developmental goal of early childhood that includes the understanding of one’s own and others’ emotions, emotional expression and the use of emotion regulation strategies and social skills. SEC attainment is a major challenge for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, its behavioral examination in naturalistic settings is scarce.The current study examined SEC components of young children with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) children during social interaction and investigated group differences and the associations between SEC components.Method26 children with ASD and 26 TD children participated in the current study. SEC was assessed using an adult-mediated interaction with a peer, designed to provide opportunities for cooperation, reciprocity, shared enjoyment, and emotion expression. Additional measures included an emotion understanding task, and parental report on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales.ResultsCompared to the TD group, the ASD group showed poorer emotional understanding, greater emotion dysregulation, and was rated by parents as having poorer social competence. Emotional understanding and emotion regulation difficulties were associated with poorer social competence, and expression of negative emotions was associated with poorer emotion regulation, in both children with and without ASD.ConclusionsThe emotional understanding and emotion regulation difficulties shown by children with ASD, and their associations with poorer social competence, highlight the need to address these in interventions targeting social competence in young children with ASD.     

Phonology and syntax in French children with SLI: A longitudinal study

Maillart and Parisse found out that French children with specific language impairment (SLI) presented strong difficulties in phonology when compared with normally‐developing children matched by MLU (NLD). Some of the youngest children from this study were followed to provide developmental information about their language deficit. Children were tested again in the same way as before (free spontaneous production) and matched by MLU against other NLD children. The previous phonological analysis was extended to include syntax as well as phonology. Percentage of words correct was computed for both phonology and syntax. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed with children's age as covariate. Results showed a significant difference between SLI and NLD children for phonology but not for syntax. There was a trend that showed that the difference between SLI and NLD children tended to increase with age. The same analysis was performed separately for 9 frequent syntactic categories for phonology and for syntax. A significant difference was found for prepositions, nouns, subject pronouns, and verbs in phonology. Effects were found for determiners and prepositions in syntax. As well as confirming the importance of phonological difficulties in SLI, our results call for a developmental theory of phonological and syntactic deficits in SLI, where differences between SLI and NLD grow with age and where there is a timing difference between phonology (earlier) and syntax (later).     

Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children

We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.     

Phonotactic probability and past tense use by children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers

A group of preschool-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI), a group of typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and a group of younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that required them to inflect with past tense -ed. The novel verbs differed in their phonotactic probabilities. The children with SLI were less likely than the other two groups to produce the novel verbs with -ed. Furthermore, they were less likely to use -ed with novel verbs of low phonotactic probability than those of high probability; this difference was not seen in the other two groups of children. It appears that the phonotactic composition of verbs is one factor that can contribute to the variability of past tense use by children with SLI.     

Psychopathological symptoms associated with psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders and their typically developing peers

Children and adolescents with autism have increased prevalence of psychosocial disabilities. Studies in autism indicate that key psychosocial factors including adaptive functioning, school absence, special needs education, frequency of peer socialization and participation in organized leisure activities may differ in their relationship with autistic, internalizing and externalizing symptoms, but the findings are so far mixed. Therefore, we examined if these measures of psychosocial functioning displayed specific associations with autistic, internalizing and/or externalizing symptoms in 61 children with autism aged 7–14 years compared to 61 typically developing controls. Multiple linear regression analyses across all participants showed that lower adaptive functioning, frequency of peer socialization and participation in leisure activities were driven by more social communication problems and not internalizing, externalizing or autistic-like symptoms including rigidity, stereotypy and sensory sensitivity. Notably, increased school absence was specifically driven by more internalizing symptoms and not autistic or externalizing symptoms. These associations were observed across all participants, both children with autism and their typically developing peers, and therefore appear to be dimensional and general in nature. Within the autism group, children who received special needs education displayed fewer social communication problems compared to those who attended regular education, while a developmental history of social interaction problems was related to lower adaptive functioning. Our findings suggest that social communication problems are more critical for psychosocial functioning than other autistic-like behaviors, internalizing or externalizing symptoms but that efforts to reduce school absence specifically need to target internalizing symptoms and not autistic-like or externalizing symptoms.     

The vocabulary profile of Slovak children with primary language impairment compared to typically developing Slovak children measured by LITMUS-CLT

ABSTRACT

This study compared a sample of children with primary language impairment (PLI) and typically developing age-matched children using the crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLT-SK). We also compared the PLI children with typically developing language-matched younger children who were matched on the basis of receptive vocabulary. Overall, statistical testing showed that the vocabulary of the PLI children was significantly different from the vocabulary of the age-matched children, but not statistically different from the younger children who were matched on the basis of their receptive vocabulary size. Qualitative analysis of the correct answers revealed that the PLI children showed higher rigidity compared to the younger language-matched children who are able to use more synonyms or derivations across word class in naming tasks. Similarly, an examination of the children’s naming errors indicated that the language-matched children exhibited more semantic errors, whereas PLI children showed more associative errors.     

Maternal recasts and activity variations: A comparison of mother--child dyads involving children with and without SLI

This study investigated maternal recast and the children’s responses comparing dyads made up of a mother and a child with typical language development (TD) or a child with specific language impairment (SLI). More specifically, this article deals with the influence of the type of activity being carried out on the number and types of maternal recasts. A sample of 17 French-speaking children with SLI (age 5 to 7 years) matched with 17 TD same-age peers was observed in interaction with their mother during four different activities (joint reading, symbolic play, question guessing game and clue guessing game). The results showed that group and activity had an impact on the number and type of recasts. Mothers of children with SLI offered more recasts than mothers of TD children. The former preferred phonological recasts whereas the latter preferred lexical ones. Moreover, recasts were more frequently used in joint reading than in other activities. Regarding the children’s responses, no significant difference was observed between the two groups. Children with SLI took up the maternal proposition more frequently after a lexical recast than after a recast of another type. The findings provide evidence for considering the features of the activities in clinical settings.     

The development of writing skills in 4-year-old children with and without specific language impairment

ABSTRACT

Research shows that many preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty acquiring literacy skills including phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabet knowledge. Limited research suggests that preschool children with SLI also have difficulty with emergent writing tasks such as name writing and word writing. In typically developing children, research indicates that emergent writing skills are acquired in a developmental sequence: (1) linearity, (2) segmentation, (3) simple characters, (4) left-right orientation, (5) complex characters, (6) random letters, and (7) invented spelling. This study compared the emergent writing skills of 4-year-old children with SLI (n = 22) to their age- and gender-matched peers (n = 22). Results indicated that children with SLI demonstrate difficulty with a variety of writing tasks, including letter writing, name writing, word writing, and sentence writing when compared to their typically-developing peers. Children with SLI followed the same developmental sequence in acquiring writing skills as their typically-developing peers.     

Syntactic comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment,autism or Down syndrome

This study examined syntactic assignment for predicates and reflexives as well as working memory effects in the sentence comprehension of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), Down syndrome (DS), high functioning Autism (HFA) and Typical Language Development (TLD). Fifty-seven children (35 boys and 22 girls) performed a computerised picture-selection sentence comprehension task. Predicate attachment and reflexive antecedent assignment (with working memory manipulations) were investigated. The results showed that SLI, HFA and DS children exhibited poorer overall performance than TLD children. Children with SLI exhibited similar performance to the DS and HFA children only when working memory demands were higher. We conclude that children with SLI, HFA and DS differ from children with TLD in their comprehension of predicate and reflexive structures where the knowledge of syntactic assignment is required. Working memory manipulation had different effects on syntactic comprehension depending on language disorder. Intelligence was not an explanatory factor for the differences observed in performance.     

How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in object clitic production and nonword repetition, which are two sensitive clinical markers of SLI in Italian. Results show that EL2 children underperform in comparison to monolinguals in the clitic task. However, in contrast to what is reported on Italian-speaking children with SLI, EL2 children tend not to omit clitics but instead produce the incorrect form, committing agreement errors. No differences are found between EL2 and monolingual children on nonword repetition. These results suggest that, at least in Italian, EL2 children only superficially resemble children with SLI and, on closer inspection, present a qualitatively and quantitatively different linguistic profile.     

Acoustic correlates of inflectional morphology in the speech of children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers

The development of the use of the third-person singular -s in open syllable verbs in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing peers was examined. Verbs that included overt productions of the third-person singular -s morpheme (e.g. Bobby plays ball everyday; Bear laughs when mommy buys popcorn) were contrasted with clearly bare stem contexts (e.g. Mommy, buy popcorn; I saw Bobby play ball) on both global and local measures of acoustic duration. A durational signature for verbs inflected with -s was identified separately from factors related to sentence length. These duration measures were also used to identify acoustic changes related to the omission of the -s morpheme. The omitted productions from the children with SLI were significantly longer than their correct third-person singular and bare stem productions. This result was unexpected given that the omitted productions have fewer phonemes than correctly inflected productions. Typically developing children did not show the same pattern, instead producing omitted productions that patterned most closely with bare stem forms. These results are discussed in relation to current theoretical approaches to SLI, with an emphasis on performance and speech-motor accounts.     

White matter microstructure correlates of narrative production in typically developing children and children with high functioning autism

This study investigated the relationship between white matter microstructure and the development of morphosyntax in a spoken narrative in typically developing children (TD) and in children with high functioning autism (HFA). Autism is characterized by language and communication impairments, yet the relationship between morphosyntactic development in spontaneous discourse contexts and neural development is not well understood in either this population or typical development. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was used to assess multiple parameters of diffusivity as indicators of white matter tract integrity in language-related tracts in children between 6 and 13 years of age. Children were asked to spontaneously tell a story about at time when someone made them sad, mad, or angry. The story was evaluated for morphological accuracy and syntactic complexity. Analysis of the relationship between white matter microstructure and language performance in TD children showed that diffusivity correlated with morphosyntax production in the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF), a fiber tract traditionally associated with language. At the anatomical level, the HFA group showed abnormal diffusivity in the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) relative to the TD group. Within the HFA group, children with greater white matter integrity in the right ILF displayed greater morphological accuracy during their spoken narrative. Overall, the current study shows an association between white matter structure in a traditional language pathway and narrative performance in TD children. In the autism group, associations were only found in the ILF, suggesting that during real world language use, children with HFA rely less on typical pathways and more on alternative ventral pathways that possibly mediate visual elements of language.