Third person pronoun errors by children with and without language impairment.

Research findings have been mixed about pronoun case problems in the language-learning profile of children with specific language impairment (SLI). This study (N= 36) extended previous findings and located a number of error patterns using detailed error analyses. Results indicated that the children with expressive SLI produced more errors with third person singular (3Psg) pronouns than did their age-level peers, but they did not make more errors than their MLU-matched peers. Error patterns were similar in the children with SLI and their language-level peers. The most frequent type of error was the substitution of the objective case for the nominative case. More errors were made on the feminine pronoun, she, than on the masculine pronoun, he. Implications for theories and clinical practice were explored. Educational objectives: As a result of this activity, the reader will (1) learn how children with SLI compare to their peers in producing third person pronouns, (2) learn the most common types of pronoun errors made by the children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU), and (3) evaluate how the findings relate to two current theories: one from typical language development and one from the area of SLI.     

An evaluation of the facilitative effects of inverted yes-no questions on the acquisition of auxiliary verbs.

According to the Auxiliary Clarification Hypothesis (ACH), yes-no questions with sentence-initial auxiliaries (i.e., inverted questions) facilitate children's initial acquisition of auxiliary verbs. Sixteen 3-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 18 2-year-olds with typical language (TL) participated in an experiment to evaluate the ACH. The children were not yet making use of auxiliaries. Half of the children participated in twenty 30-min "enrichment" sessions over a 2-month period, during which an assistant produced 30 inverted question recasts in response to the child's own utterances. Fifteen question recasts contained the auxiliary is, and 15 contained the modal will. The other half of the children participated in play sessions but were not exposed to inverted is and will questions. Contrary to predictions based on the ACH, the results revealed no positive effects of the enrichment for is, for will, or for the broader BE and Modal auxiliary categories for either group of children. The children with TL demonstrated advantages over the children with SLI for the general category of BE forms but not for the category of Modals. Inverted questions may be too complex to foster the initial acquisition of auxiliaries in children not already using them productively.     

Selected syntactic usage of language-impaired children

The syntactic performance of ten language-impaired and ten normal children, matched by mean length of utterance was compared. Language samples were analyzed with respect to grammatical marker need index (GMN), grammatical marker error index (GME), and GMEs for nouns (GME-N), verbs (GME-V), bound (GME-B), and unbound (GME-U) forms. The distribution of syntactic errors for nine syntactic categories was also explored. There was no significance between the groups for GMN; significant between-group differences were found for GME, GME-N versus GME-V, and GME-B versus GME-U. For all children, noun-related forms elicited fewer errors than verb-related forms; no differences were found between bound and unbound elements. The distribution of errors for the syntactic categories revealed that significant differences were not found between the groups. More errors were made with articles than pronouns and with contractible auxiliaries than contractible copulas. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of the syntactic impairments in language-impaired children and clinical implications.     

Error monitoring in people who stutter: evidence against auditory feedback defect theories.

Several theories purport that people who stutter suffer a speech-auditory feedback defect. The disordered feedback creates the illusion that some kind of error has intruded into the speech flow. Stuttering then results from actions aimed to correct the suspected, but nonexistent, error. These auditory feedback defect theories thus predict deviant error detection performance in people who stutter during speech production. To test this prediction, subjects who stuttered and those who did not had to detect self-produced (phonemic) speech errors while speaking with normal auditory feedback and with the auditory feedback masked by white noise. The two groups did not differ significantly in error detection accuracy and speed, nor in false alarm scores. This opposes auditory feedback defect theories and suggests that the self-monitoring processes of people who stutter function normally. In a condition in which errors had to be detected in other-produced speech, i.e., while listening to a tape recording, subjects who stuttered did detect fewer errors. Whether this might signal some general phonological problem is discussed.     

Semantic representation and naming in children with specific language impairment.

When 16 children with SLI (mean age = 6;2) and 16 normally developing age-mates named age-appropriate objects, the SLI cohort made more naming errors. For both cohorts, semantic misnaming and indeterminate responses were the predominant error types. The contribution of limited semantic representation to these naming errors was explored. Each participant drew and defined each item from his or her semantic and indeterminate error pools and each item from his or her correctly named pool. When compared, the drawings and definitions of items from the error pools were poorer, suggesting limited semantic knowledge. The profiles of information included in definitions of items from the correct pool and the error pools were highly similar, suggesting that representations associated with misnaming differed quanlitatively, but not qualitatively, from those associated with correct naming. Eleven members of the SLI cohort also participated in a forced-choice recognition task. Performance was significantly lower on erroneous targets than on correctly named targets. When performance was compared across all three post-naming tasks (drawing, defining, recognition), the participants evinced sparse semantic knowledge for roughly half of all semantic misnaming and roughly one third of all indeterminate responses. In additional cases, representational gaps were evident. This study demonstrates that the degree of knowledge represented in the child's semantic lexicon makes words more or less vulnerable to retrieval failure and that limited semantic knowledge contributes to the frequent naming errors of children with SLI.     

Children's auditory assembly of present progressive and past tense sentences.

Auditory assembly performance of kindergarten-age children was studied using either present progressive or past tense sentences. Thirty children enrolled in kindergarten repeated six past tense sentences and six present tense sentences. Sentence length was systematically increased from six to 11 words. All responses were tape recorded and analyzed according to total errors, error types, word position, word type, and semantic information. Results indicated significantly more omission errors than substitution, nouns and verbs were best retained, and error rates increased linearly through the nine-word sentences with a greater number of errors occurring in the 10- and 11-word sentences. In addition, there was no significant difference in ability to assemble past or present progressive tense sentences. Finally, in contrast to preschool children, kindergarten-age children retained key items (noun, verb, and object) during assembly performance of all 12 sentences.     

Auditory semantic, syntactic, and retention errors made by aphasic subjects on the token test

The Token Test was administered to 25 mild aphasic and 25 matched normal subjects for the purpose of determining the linguistic nature of the auditory verbal comprehension error responses. As was expected,the aphasic subjects obtained significantly poorer scores on the Token Test than did the normal subjects, with minimal overlap between the two groups. In Parts I–IV, the errors were exclusively semantic, and reflected only the amount of required verbal memory. Im Part V, the syntactic structures vary, and the aphasic subjects showed a similar pattern of difficulty as did the normal subjects. Syntactic errors were more prevalent than semantic errors in Part V, suggesting that syntactic complexity was the most important factor in verbal comprehension on this part. In comparison to previous research utilizing the Token Test with normal children, the aphasic subjects in the present study generally had high error rates on the same items as did the children.     

School-age children's metalinguistic awareness of grammaticality in verb form

This study investigated 6-, 7-, and 8-year-old children's ability to monitor grammaticality in the past progressive, perfect progressive, and perfect verb forms. The children achieved a significantly higher rate of accurate judgments monitoring grammatical forms that ungrammatical forms. Age was a significant factor in error identification. Eight-year-olds were substantially better at identifying ungrammatical forms than were their younger schoolmates. Verb form, in conjunction with type of anomaly, significantly varied with respect to ease of identification. Errors of the auxiliary and suffix were easier for children to identify than an adverbial error which required a sentence analysis to determine the incompatibility. The context surrounding ungrammatical verb forms significantly affected monitoring ability. Anomalous forms in unrelated sentences were easier to identify as ungrammatical than anomalous forms in sentences taken from a story the children had just heard. It appears that school-age children prefer to maintain the semantic intent of the message rather than critically search for grammatical errors.     

The impact of lexical factors on children's word-finding errors.

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 30 children with word-finding difficulties (aged 8 to 12 years) had difficulty naming and the types of errors they made on these words. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors that might influence naming performance: word frequency, age of acquisition, familiarity, and lexical neighborhood. Findings indicated that neighborhood density predicted word-finding success, and target word substitutions and error patterns manifested were affected by the lexical factors under study. Students tended to produce substitutions that were higher in frequency, learned earlier, and that resided in neighborhoods of greater density and higher frequency than the target word. Lexical factors also influenced children's error patterns. Neighborhood density predicted form-related errors: Children produced more blocked errors on words from sparse neighborhoods. Word frequency and neighborhood frequency predicted form-segment-related errors as phonologic errors occurred on rare words and words whose neighbors contained lower frequency, uncommon phonological patterns. This important first step in the examination of how lexical factors have an impact on word-finding errors in children suggests that different types of words are more likely to result in failures of lexical access at different stages of processing. Theoretical and practical implications of these preliminary findings are discussed.     

Production operations and the use of nonfinite verbs by children with specific language impairment.

Recent evidence from structural priming studies suggests that children with specific language impairment (SLI) are more likely to produce verb morphemes such as auxiliary is when their previous sentence contained an auxiliary than when it did not. The same paradigm was employed in the present study to determine whether failures to include auxiliary is might be due to prior use of nonfinite sentences (e.g., The mouse eating the cheese). Preschoolers with SLI and a group of younger normally developing children were more likely to produce auxiliary is to describe target pictures when the preceding sentence contained auxiliary are than when it contained past tense. Use of is in the target sentence was least likely when the preceding sentence was nonfinite. The implications of these findings for current accounts of SLI and current models of sentence production are discussed.     

General language performance measures in spoken and written narrative and expository discourse of school-age children with language learning disabilities.

Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open to questions of method and interpretation. This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological-age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers. Children produced both spoken and written summaries of two educational videotapes that provided models of either narrative or expository (informational) discourse. Productivity measures, including total T-units, total words, and words per minute, were significantly lower for children with LLD than for CA children. Fluency (percent T-units with mazes) and lexical diversity (number of different words) measures were similar for all children. Grammatical complexity as measured by words per T-unit was significantly lower for LLD children. However, there was no difference among groups for clauses per T-unit. The only measure that distinguished children with LLD from both CA and LA peers was the extent of grammatical error. Effects of discourse genre and modality were consistent across groups. Compared to narratives, expository summaries were shorter, less fluent (spoken versions), more complex (words per T-unit), and more error prone. Written summaries were shorter and had more errors than spoken versions. For many LLD and LA children, expository writing was exceedingly difficult. Implications for accounts of language impairment in older children are discussed.     

The effect of implantation age on visual attention skills

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to evaluate the visual attention skills of deaf children with cochlear implants and to determine whether age at implantation had any impact on visual attention skills. SUBJECT AND METHODS: Thirty children with cochlear implants aged 6 and 11 years were evaluated and were compared with age matched 36 normal hearing children. The children with cochlear implants were analyzed in to two groups according to their age at implantation; under and at/over 4 years old. The Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS) was used in order to evaluate visual attention skills of cochlear implanted (Group 1 and Group 2) and children with normal hearing. The number of correct responses, extraneous button presses (commission errors) and the number of omission errors or the failure to respond to target stimuli which were recorded by GDS was used to evaluate the visual attention skills of the subjects. Also six different types of commission errors (19X, XX9, XX1, X1X, X9X, XXX) were analyzed and compared both for normal and cochlear implant user children. RESULTS: Concerning the total number of correct response, omission and commission errors no statistical difference was found between two implanted groups. Besides, both groups with cochlear implantation differed from normal hearing peers on the total number of correct responses, omission errors (p<0.017). According to these findings cochlear implanted children had less correct responses and had more omission errors compared with control group. These findings clearly show that children with cochlear implants performed poorly on visual attention task which requires constant attention together with the ability to exert impulse control despite they hear enhanced sensory information by cochlear implants. Concerning the types of commission errors Group 1 and 2 performed similarly in all types of errors (p>0.017). Besides, Group 1 and 2 made more errors in types 19X, XX9 and XXX, XX9 compared with the control group (p<0.017). Group 2 who had their implants after age of 4 years old had more commission errors than the control group (p<0.017) and positive correlation was found between the total commission errors and XX9 error type with age at implantation. These findings show that children who had their implants at older ages made more commission errors and XX9 type of commission error. The children who were implanted after 4 years old were less mature; unsuccessful in controlling their impulsive behaviors and more careless where they can not get enough benefit from social and environmental motives compared with their normal hearing peers. CONCLUSION: This present research points out the positive effect of early implantation on visual attention and the possible adversities such as impulsivity, over-impatience and attention deficits which have been previously suggested as preventive or slowing down factors for the pace of auditory-verbal therapy for cochlear implantees. Assuming that the results of this study support the theory of insufficiency which suggested that the deprivation in auditory system would also adversely affect cognitive structures involved in intermodal processing the importance of early implantation is underlined. If early cochlear implantation will be carried out especially at the very critical period of language development (before age of four), this will help the child, in his/her future life, not only with his/her hearing skills and communication but for his/her attention skills and behavior.     

Comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language-impaired children

This study investigated comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. Two experiments, using different paradigms, were undertaken. In Experiment 1, 14 SLI children (aged 4:10-7:10) were compared with children matched on chronological age and language age (LA). Subjects acted out 36 semantically reversible sentences that varied in thematic content (transitives, locatives, and datives) and in the order of thematic roles (canonical and noncanonical). The SLI children performed at a significantly lower level than both control groups. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented using a picture-pointing task. A single word vocabulary test preceded the test sentences to assess semantic knowledge of the predicates. Sixteen SLI children were compared with language age controls. No significant differences were found between the performance of the two groups on the vocabulary test, and in general, the results of Experiment 2 supported those of Experiment 1. Analysis of individual children's error patterns identified qualitative differences between the SLI children and the LA controls. The majority of SLI children had a very high proportion of word order errors. The proportion of word order errors of the SLI children, unlike those of the LA controls, was unrelated to language age. These findings are considered in relation to the processes involved in sentence comprehension.     

Acquisition of english grammatical morphology by native mandarin-speaking children and adolescents: age-related differences.

PURPOSE: This 5-year longitudinal study investigated the acquisition of 6 English grammatical morphemes (i.e., regular and irregular past tense, 3rd person singular, progressive aspect -ing, copula BE, and auxiliary DO) by 10 native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents in the United States (arrived in the United States between 5 and 16 years of age). The goals were to chart and compare the acquisition trajectories and levels of mastery across the morphemes, identify when age-related differences emerged and which forms they took. METHOD: Morphological proficiency was measured by the accuracy of these morphemes in obligatory contexts during spontaneous speech. RESULTS: The morphemes were mastered by different numbers of participants and showed different growth trajectories. Performance variance was partially predicted by age of arrival (AoAr) in the United States, with early arrivals achieving greater proficiency than late arrivals. However, such AoAr effects took several years to occur and only existed for 2 of the 6 morphemes (i.e., 3rd person singular and regular past tense). Growth curve analysis revealed that language environment was a stronger predictor of individual differences than AoAr. Results did not uncover age-related differences in the acquisition of tense versus non-tense-related morphemes, nor in regular versus irregular morphemes, nor in the error types. CONCLUSION: Findings support an Environmental account for age-related differences in 2nd language (L2) morphological acquisition. Results also indicate that the acquisition of some grammatical morphemes by school-aged immigrants takes several years to complete. As L2 learners exhibit some error types and difficulties similar to monolingual children with specific language impairment, caution needs to be taken when interpreting and using morphological errors as indicators of speech/language learning problems in this population.     

The effect of talker- and listener-related factors on intelligibility for a real-word, open-set perception test.

The aims of this study were to evaluate whether talker intelligibility is consistent across listeners differing in age and gender and to investigate the process of attunement to talker characteristics in children and adults. Word intelligibility rates were obtained from 135 listeners (adults, 11-12-year-olds, and 7-8-year-olds) for 45 talkers from a homogeneous accent group. There were 2 test conditions, each containing multiple talkers. Both test conditions contained multiple talkers. In the single-word condition, key words were presented in isolation, whereas in the triplet condition, triplets of key words were preceded by a precursor sentence by the same talker. For identical word materials, word intelligibility at a signal-to-noise ratio of +6 dB varied significantly across talkers from 81.2% to 96.4%. Overall, younger listeners made significantly more errors than older children or adults, and women talkers were more intelligible than other classes of talkers. The relative intelligibility of the 45 talkers was highly consistent across listener groups, suggesting that talker intelligibility is primarily determined by talker-related factors rather than by the interrelation of talker- and listener-related factors. The presence of a precursor sentence providing indexical information did improve word intelligibility for the bottom quartile of listeners in each of the listener groups.     

Naming errors of children with specific language impairment.

This paper explores why children with SLI are less accurate than peers in naming pictures. Subjects included 66 children with SLI (aged 4:3 to 9:7) with 2 subgroups, one with expressive-only language deficits (SLIexp) and one with receptive and expressive language deficits (SLImix), and 66 children with no language impairment (NLI). Children with SLI made more errors than children with NLI, and proportionally more of their errors were names of objects associated with the pictured object (e.g., shoe/foot) and names that were phonologically related to the target than were those with NLI. The relative frequency of error types was related to pattern of language deficit; in comparison to their NLI peers, a greater proportion of SLIexp errors were phonological errors, and a greater proportion of the SLImix errors were semantic associated, semantic perceptual, and nonsemantic perseverative. The proportion of semantic-associated errors also discriminated a subgroup of the children with SLI from a matched subgroup of the children with SLImix. Interpretations and potential implications are discussed.     

Phonetic speech perception deficits in dyslexia

Adult developmental dyslexics showed deficits in the identification of the vowels of English when the sole acoustic cues were steady-state formant frequency patterns. Deficits in the identification of place of articulation of the English stop-consonants [b], [d] and [g] in syllable-initial position were also observed. The average consonantal error rate was 22%. These error rates are significantly different from those of nondyslexic control groups (p less than .01). No single deficit characterized the entire group of dyslexic subjects. The pattern of errors with respect to place of articulation also varied for different groups of subjects. Three dyslexics have high vowel error rates and low consonantal error rates. The data are consistent with the premise that dyslexic subjects may have different perceptual deficits rather than a general auditory deficit involving the rate at which they can process perceptual information. The clinical histories of the present subjects suggest genetic transmission of these speech perception deficits. The presence of genetic variation in the biological substrate relevant to the perception of human speech should be further explored.     

Profiles of dysfluency and errors in classroom discourse among children with language impairment

The current study is part of a larger study that focused on within-group classroom discourse patterns of children in special education classes for language impairment (LI). Eleven children with LI aged 7–9 were examined across 4 classroom contexts: dialogic journal-writing, group lesson, peer play and sharing time. Amount and complexity of language produced (mean length of turn, type token ratio), dysfluency (self-correction, self-repetition and speaker overlap) and communicative errors were plotted for visual analysis of profiles of performance. Results showed group differences in amount and complexity of language produced, dysfluency and errors. Profiles revealed individual variation in patterns of performance that tended to cluster into sub-group similarities in amount and complexity of talk, dysfluency and errors. Implications relate to the sub-classification of LI, as well as to assessment of and therapy for such subgroups.Learning outcomes: The reader will be able to consider why within-group patterns offer different and more qualitative information than cross-group comparisons, and understand the need for both approaches to the study of language in atypically developing children. The reader will be able to differentiate between group patterns and individual differences in dimensions of classroom discourse. The reader will be able to appreciate the impact of social context on different dimensions of communication among children with LI in the classroom. The reader will be able to discuss the role that individual differences and group patterns bear on issues of assessment and treatment of LI in the school system.     

Investigating the inner speech of people who stutter: evidence for (and against) the covert repair hypothesis

In their Covert Repair Hypothesis, Postma and Kolk (1993) suggest that people who stutter make greater numbers of phonological encoding errors, which are detected during the monitoring of inner speech and repaired, with stuttering-like disfluencies as a consequence. Here, we report an experiment that documents the frequency with which such errors are made. Thirty-two people who stutter (PWS) and thirty-two normally fluent controls, matched for age, gender and education, recited tonguetwisters and self-reported any errors they perceived themselves to have made. In 50% of trials the tonguetwisters were recited silently and errors reported were those detected in inner speech. Compared to controls, PWS produced significantly more word-onset and word-order errors. Crucially, this difference was found in inner as well as in overt speech. Comparison of experimenter ratings and participants' own self-ratings of their overt speech revealed similar levels of accuracy across the two groups, ruling out a suggestion that PWS were simply more sensitive to the errors they made. However, the frequency of participants' inner-speech errors was not correlated to their SSI4 scores, nor to two other measures of stuttering severity. Our findings support Postma and Kolk's contention that, when speech rate is held constant, PWS make, and therefore detect, more errors of phonological encoding. They do not, however, support the hypothesis that stuttering-like disfluencies in everyday speech stem from covert repairs of errors of phonological encoding. Learning outcomes: Readers will learn about three current psycholinguistic theories of stuttering, and how speech-errors elicited during tonguetwister recitation can be used to explore the controversies that exist surrounding: (a) Whether or not people who stutter are more prone to making language production errors; and (b) The extent to which stuttering-like disfluencies stem from covert repairs of language-production errors.     

Morphological productivity in children with normal language and SLI: a study of the English past tense.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are known to display persistent difficulties with inflectional morphology--in particular, the overuse of unmarked grammatical forms (i.e., zero-marking). Yet, several recent studies have shown that English-speaking children with SLI, like their normal language peers (NL), demonstrate a considerable degree of productive language abilities (e.g., Bishop, 1994; Loeb & Leonard, 1991; Oetting & Horohov, 1997). In this study, we explore productivity in the English past tense in school-age children with SLI (N= 31) and NL (N = 31) who were equivalent as a group in chronological and mental age. Although children in both groups produced a range of error types, the children with SLI produced significantly more errors, with a greater proportion resulting from zero-marking (e.g., go) than suffixation (e.g., goed). Item analyses indicated that suffixations and zero-markings were predicted by item frequency, phonological features of stems, and similarity relationships across items (i.e., neighborhood structure) in both groups, yet children with SLI were more sensitive to item phonology than their NL peers. Results are interpreted in light of the predictions of dual- versus single-mechanism models of morphological productivity. Implications for accounts of SLI are discussed.