Bound-morpheme skills in the oral language of school-age, language-impaired children

Bound-morpheme skills of school-age, language-impaired (LI) children were explored with three tasks designed to assess multiple dimensions of this component of language. Ten English-speaking, school-age LI children (Mean age: 10:3) and ten children with normal language (Mean age: 9:9) served as subjects. A two-way analysis of variance revealed significant group differences. Fisher a priori testing documented significant group differences for a measure of English bound-morpheme skill levels, a measure of ability to generalize English bound-morphemes to novel words, and a measure of ability to learn novel bound-morphemes attached to novel words. The findings indicate that core features of developmental language impairment in preschool children—poor ability to learn, to use, and to generalize bound-morphemes—are also present in school-age, LI children.     

Relations among verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills in normal language and specifically language-impaired children

This study tested the hypothesis that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children have a qualitatively different cognitive system from that of normal language (NL) children. Twenty NL and 20 SLI children between the ages of 4:2 (years: months) and 5:11 were presented with experimental language-learning measures, experimental nonverbal measures, and verbal and nonverbal norm-referenced tests. A confirmatory analysis of the covariance matrix structures of the two subject groups indicated that relations among cognitive skills differed between NL and SLI children. In addition, a planned comparison indicated that the relation between nonverbal rule-induction and novel bound-morpheme learning differed significantly between groups. The findings indicate that a “qualitative-differences” model of specific language impairment better accounts for the co-occurrence of poor verbal and poor nonverbal cognitive skills in SLI children than a “low-normal” model.     

Symbolic play in normal and language-impaired children

The symbolic play of 15 normally developing (CA, 16-22 months) and 15 language-impaired children (CA, 32-49 months), whose productive language skills were at the single-word utterance level, was compared. Symbolic play was assessed formally through the Symbolic Play Test and informally through the observation of spontaneous play. The language-impaired children were found to be developmentally advanced when compared to the language-matched normal children in the level and direction of their symbolic play. Relative to age norms, however, the language-impaired children evidenced deficits in symbolic play. Thus, their linguistic and symbolic play abilities were not equally impaired. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the relationship between symbolic play and language and for the nature of specific language impairment.     

The use of an invented language rule in the differentiation of normal and language-impaired Spanish-speaking children

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the results of a language-teaching procedure could be used to identify specific language-impaired children in a group of bilingual children with limited English proficiency (LEP). An invented morpheme was taught to two groups of LEP children who had been previously identified as normal and specific language-impaired. The language-impaired group learned the morpheme at a slower rate than the normal children, thus allowing the two groups to be differentiated. The approach promises to circumvent many of the obstacles that impede current practices for identifying language impairment in the LEP population.     

Fast mapping in normal and language-impaired children

In this study, the fast mapping skills of a group of 11 normal children (ages 4:0-5:6) were compared to those of a group of 11 language-impaired children (ages 4:1-5:4) exhibiting expressive syntactic deficits. Fast mapping is a hypothesized process enabling children to create lexical representations for new words after as little as a single exposure. Subjects encountered a nonsense word and its novel object referent. Subsequent tasks probed the amount and kinds of information about the new word that the subjects had entered into memory. Normal and language-impaired subjects did not differ in their ability to infer a connection between the novel word and referent, to comprehend the novel word after a single exposure, and to recall some nonlinguistic information associated with the referent. However, the language-impaired subjects were less successful than the normal subjects in producing the new word, recalling significantly fewer of its three phonemes.     

Linguistic humor comprehension of normal and language-impaired adolescents

The purpose of this study was to compare the ability of normally achieving and language-impaired adolescents to comprehend linguistic humor in a decontextualized situation. A classification scheme was used to describe 10 elements of linguistic humor. Riddles, jokes, and puns used as stimulus materials were classified and placed into one of the 10 linguistic categories. The categories were arranged according to the lexical, phonological, morphological, or syntactic element on which each humor item could be based. The two groups of subjects were 12 normally achieving and 12 language-impaired high school students from Grades 9-12. As expected, the language-impaired group had significantly poorer comprehension of the humor elements than the normally achieving group. Especially poor were their ability to grasp the nature of multimeaning words and their ability to segment and redefine phonological strings. The use of this classification scheme for developing strategies for assessment and intervention activities that involve linguistic-based humor is discussed.     

Symbolic play and social participation abilities of language-impaired and normally developing children

The symbolic play and social participation behaviors of 6 language-impaired and 8 normal language-learning children were compared on three measures of play: (a) the Symbolic Play Test (Lowe & Costello, 1976), (b) the Brown-Lunzer Scale (Brown, Redmond, Bass, Liebergott, & Swope, 1975), and (c) the Scale of Social Participation in Play (Tizard, Philps, & Plewis, 1976). Subject groups were equated for MLU (Brown, 1973), Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974), and performance on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language (Carrow, 1973). Results indicated that the language-impaired subjects demonstrated significant deficits in symbolic, adaptive, and integrative play behaviors in comparison with the linguistically equivalent normal subjects. The language-impaired group also evidenced significantly more nonplay and significantly less solitary and parallel play than their normal peers. Findings are discussed with respect to the developmental relationship between language and cognition.     

Proportional and functional analogical reasoning in normal and language-impaired children

Teachers often use analogies in classroom settings to clarify new concepts for their students. However, analogies may inadvertently confuse the youngster who has difficulty identifying the one-to-one comparisons underlying them. Although analogical reasoning has been studied extensively in normal children, no information was available concerning this construct in children having a specific language impairment. Thus, it was unknown to what extent they might be deficient in analogical reasoning. Therefore, in the present study, 20 children ages 6-8 years (mean age = 7:6) having normal nonverbal intelligence but deficits in language comprehension were administered tasks of verbal and perceptual proportional analogical reasoning and a problem-solving task of functional analogical reasoning. Compared to a normal-language control group matched on the basis of chronological age and sex, the language-impaired group was deficient in all three tasks of analogical reasoning. However, when the factor of nonverbal intelligence was controlled statistically, the differences between the groups on each of the tasks were removed. Additional findings were that verbal proportional analogical reasoning was significantly correlated to perceptual proportional analogical reasoning and to functional analogical reasoning. Implications for assessment and intervention with young school-age language-impaired children are discussed.     

Delay versus deviance in the language acquisition of language-impaired children.

To investigate the issue of delay versus deviance in the language acquisition of language-impaired (LI) children, the order of acquisition of a set of linguistic structures and the relationship obtaining between one structure and another were examined in comprehension and production over a 5-year period in a group of LI and language-matched normal children. The results demonstrated a marked similarity between groups, both in the point at which mastery of individual structures was achieved and in the overall patterns of acquisition demonstrated. These data suggest that LI children are constructing grammars based on the same rules and principles as those of linguistically normal control subjects, and that their linguistic impairments may be principally processing, not representational, in nature.     

The identification of language impairment in the selection of specifically language-impaired subjects

This review focused on the methods used to identify language impairment in specifically language-impaired subjects participating in 72 research studies that were described in four journals from 1983 to 1988. The single most frequent source of information used in the identification process was found to be test data. There was, however, considerable variability and, often, a lack of clarity regarding the specific number and identity of tests used. More specific findings on test use indicated that researchers routinely assessed both expressive and receptive language and that they used incomplete tests. When test scores used in identification and selection were examined, there was a wide range of score types, and age-equivalent scores were by far the most common and often the only type of score utilized. Conclusions are drawn regarding the impact of these findings on the interpretation and generalizability of this research literature.     

The dimensionality of language ability in school-age children.

PURPOSE: This study asked if children's performance on language tests reflects different dimensions of language and if this dimensionality changes with development. METHOD: Children were given standardized language batteries at kindergarten and at second, fourth, and eighth grades. A revised modified parallel analysis was used to determine the dimensionality of these items at each grade level. A confirmatory factor analysis was also performed on the subtest scores to evaluate alternate models of dimensionality. RESULTS: The revised modified parallel analysis revealed a single dimension across items with evidence of either test specific or language area specific minor dimensions at different ages. The confirmatory factor analysis tested models involving modality (receptive or expressive) and domain (vocabulary or sentence use) against a single-dimension model. The 2-dimensional model involving domains of vocabulary and sentence use fit the data better than the single-dimensional model; however, the single-dimension model also fit the data well in the lower grades. CONCLUSIONS: Much of the variance in standardized measures of language appears to be attributable to a single common factor or trait. There is a developmental trend during middle childhood for grammatical abilities and vocabulary abilities to become differentiated. These measures do not provide differential information concerning receptive and expressive abilities.     

The ability of normal and language-impaired children to produce grammatical corrections

The ability of normal and language-impaired children to correct grammatical violations of word order was examined. Ten language-impaired and 10 linguistically normal subjects were sampled from the following age levels: 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 years, resulting in a total of 100 subjects. Using a procedure designed to focus attention on language form, each of the children performed a task requiring the correction of 10 sentences containing word order errors. Normal 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds performed significantly better than their language-impaired age-matched peers. In addition, the performance of language-impaired 9-, and 10-year-olds was superior to that of the younger impaired groups. In the normal groups, the only age level differences were produced by the 6-year-olds, who performed significantly more poorly than two of the older (8- and 10-year-old) groups.     

Spoken and written language relationships in language/learning-impaired and normally achieving school-age children.

Students with language/learning impairment (LLI) and three groups of normally achieving children matched for chronological age, spoken language, and reading abilities wrote and told stories that were analyzed according to a three-dimensional language analysis system. Spoken narratives were linguistically superior to written narratives in many respects. The content of written narratives, however, was organized differently than the content of spoken narratives. Spoken narratives contained more local interconnections than global interconnections; the opposite was true for written narratives. LLI and reading-matched children evidenced speaking-writing relationships that differed from those of the age- and language-matched children in the way language form was organized. Further, LLI children produced more grammatically unacceptable complex T-units in their spoken and written stories than students from any of the three matched groups. The discussion focuses on mechanisms underlying the development of speaking-writing differences and ramifications of spoken-language impairment for spoken and written-language relationships.     

The use of grammatical morphemes by normal and language-impaired children.

An examination was made of the grammatical morpheme usage of normal children and language-impaired children matched at two different levels of mean utterance length. The language-impaired children displayed less grammatical morpheme usage than the normal children with equivalent mean utterance length. However, no use of alternative features of semantic importance by the language-impaired children was noted, suggesting that no unique patterns for acquiring language were in operation. Instead, it appears that the language-impaired children may have attached less communicative significance to grammatical morphemes.     

A comparison of the age-MLU relation in normal and specifically language-impaired preschool children

The relation between age and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU) was evaluated in a sample of 48 preschool children between 24 and 50 months of age. Twenty-four of these children were diagnosed as having a specific language impairment, and 24 were considered language normal. The groups were matched on age, race, sex, and parental education level. A majority of the children in each group were from lower-middle-class backgrounds. MLU was derived from 20-min mother-child conversations as the dyad engaged in free play. The results showed that (a) age and MLU were significantly correlated in the normal group (r = .75) and in the group of specifically language-impaired children (r = .77), (b) the predicted MLU of the language-impaired group was lower than that of the normal group across the age range, and (c) the rate of MLU change in each group was similar. The age-MLU relation observed in the lower-middle-class normal children compared favorably to that reported previously for middle- to upper-middle-class children (Miller & Chapman, 1981). The finding that MLU changed at a similar rate in the normal and language-impaired groups is evaluated in light of the observation that childhood language disability is usually associated with slower rates of language development.