The leading-edge: the significance of sentence disruptions in the development of grammar.

This research explored the relationship between sentence disruptions and the length and complexity of sentences spoken by children developing grammar. The study was cross-sectional in design and used samples of naturalistic, conversational interaction between 26 typically developing children (ages 2;6 to 4;0) and a primary caregiver. The active, declarative sentences produced by these children were coded for the presence of disruption, length in morphemes and words, and clausal complexity. The results showed that, for the majority of the children, disrupted sentences tended to be longer and more complex than fluent sentences. The magnitude of the differences in length and complexity was positively correlated with the children's grammatical development, as measured by the Index of Productive Syntax. It was also found that differences between the average complexity of disrupted versus fluent sentences increased with grammatical development even when sentence length was held constant. As grammatical development proceeded, disrupted sentences were more apt to be sentences on the "leading-edge" of the child's production capacity. Although these more advanced grammatical structures are part of the child's grammatical competence, the child cannot produce these sentences without an increased risk of processing difficulty. The results are congruent with proposals concerning the incremental and procedural nature of adult sentence production.     

Stalls and revisions: a developmental perspective on sentence production

PURPOSE: The purpose of this research was to test the empirical validity of the stall-revision distinction and to provide a characterization of the development of sentence production using this distinction. METHOD: The stall-revision dichotomy for sentence disruptions was studied in 20 typically developing children. The children's production of short sentences was observed from 21 to 33 months of age. Developmental changes in stall and revision rates were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling, time centered at 27 months. Differences between stall and revision rates across 2 levels of sentence length were also explored with repeated-measures analysis of variance when the children were 33 months of age. RESULTS: A clear development trend was observed for revision rate. At 27 months of age, revisions occurred in approximately 1% of children's sentences and increased with age. No significant individual differences were apparent in the growth parameters for revision rate. In contrast, group developmental trends in stall rate were not discernable. However, stall rate increased significantly with sentence length, whereas revision rate remained constant. CONCLUSION: The contrasting pattern of findings provides support for the stall-revision dichotomy. The authors argue that the developmental changes in revision rate reflect changes in the children's ability to monitor their language production.     

The argument-structure complexity effect in children with specific language impairment: evidence from the use of grammatical morphemes in French.

PURPOSE: The hypothesis that the linguistic deficit presented by children with specific language impairment (SLI) is caused by limited cognitive resources (e.g., S. Ellis Weismer & L. Hesketh, 1996) was tested against the hypothesis of a limitation in linguistic knowledge (e.g., M. L. Rice, K. Wexler, & P. Cleave, 1995). METHOD: The study examined the influence of the argument-structure complexity of a target sentence on the production of grammatical morphemes in French children with SLI compared with younger children matched for grammatical level in production (GL) and children of the same chronological age (CA). A sentence production task was used where the target sentences varied in terms of argument complexity and length. RESULTS: The results indicated that children with SLI used articles and auxiliaries in obligatory contexts significantly less often than both the GL and CA control groups: More complex argument structures elicited the highest number of grammatical morpheme omissions; this effect was larger in children with SLI than in the GL group and was independent of the length of the sentences, which failed to show any influence on the production of grammatical morphemes. CONCLUSION: These results support the hypothesis that grammatical-morpheme deficit in SLI depends at least in part on limited processing capacities.     

Congruity and predictability between two measures of nonstandard dialect usage on four grammatical forms

This study investigated whether Nonstandard English (NSE) dialect responses to an examiner-constructed sentence completion test were congruent with and predictive of use of NSE during spontaneous conversation. The sentence completion test was designed to evoke either NSE or Standard English (SE) dialect variants of four grammatical forms for which the NSE dialect variants are highly stigmatized. The 76 Black male subjects were between the ages of 15:8 and 23:5 years. The grammatical forms assessed were verb-subject agreement third person singular, negative concord, possessive suffix, and continuative be. A low but statistically significant correlation was found between the percentage of NSE usage on the test and during conversation when all four grammatical forms were combined (r = .2344, p less than .05). Only the possessive suffix form showed a statistically significant correlation between the two measures when correlations were computed for individual grammatical forms (r = .4341, p less than .05). Thus, congruency was interpreted to be highly variable and dependent on the particular grammatical form. To measure predictability, data were inspected for each grammatical form to determine the percentage of subjects who used at least one NSE dialect variant for sentence completion test items when at least one NSE variant of that form occurred during spontaneous conversation. Responses to the sentence completion test were predictive of NSE during conversation for more than 90% of the subjects only for the negative concord grammatical form. It was concluded that the sentence completion test is satisfactorily congruent with and predictive of patterns of dialect used in spontaneous conversation only for certain specific grammatical forms. Some possible reasons for these variable results and their implications for second dialect assessment are offered.     

Profiles of grammatical morphology and sentence imitation in children with specific language impairment and Down syndrome.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the grammatical morphology and sentence imitation performance of two different groups of children with language impairment and to compare their performance with that of children learning language typically. Expressive use of tense-bearing and non-tense-related grammatical morphemes was explored. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), with Down syndrome (DS), and with typical language development (TL) were matched on mean length of utterance (MW). Performance was compared primarily on composite measures of tense, tense inflections, and non-tense morphemes, as well as on the Sentences subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R; D. Wechsler, 1989). Exploratory analyses were completed on a set of 11 individual grammatical morphemes as a follow-up to the principal analyses. As predicted, the children with SLI performed significantly more poorly than the children with TL on all three composite measures. In addition, the DS group exhibited significantly weaker performance than did the TL group on the tense inflections and non-tense morpheme composites. Although there were no statistically reliable differences between the SLI and DS groups on any morpheme measure, the groups were not comparably weak in their use of the regular post, -ed; the irregular third person singular morphemes (e.g., has, does); the present progressive, -ing; or the use of modals. The SLI and DS groups both performed more poorly than did the TL group on the sentence imitation task.     

A method for examining productivity of grammatical morphology in children with and without specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show inconsistent use of grammatical morphology. Children who are developing language typically also show a period during which they produce grammatical morphemes inconsistently. Various theories claim that both young typically developing children and children with SLI achieve correct production through memorization of some inflected forms (M. Gopnik, 1997; M. Tomasello, 2000a, 2000b). Adapting a method introduced by C. Miller and L. Leonard (1998), the authors investigated the use of present tense third singular -s by 24 typically developing preschoolers and 36 preschoolers with SLI. Each group was divided into 2 mean length of utterance (MLU) levels. Group and individual data provided little evidence that memorization could explain the correct productions of the third singular morpheme for either children with SLI or typically developing children, and there was no difference between children with higher and lower MLUs.     

The effect of pictured visual cues on elicited sentence imitation

In one experiment language-normal 6 1/2-year-old and 4 1/2-year-old children (N = 68) were asked to imitate sentences with or without pictured visual cues. In a second experiment groups of language-disordered children (N = 43) also 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 years of age were asked to imitate sentences with and without pictured visual cues. In both experiments there was no significant difference in the syntactical and grammatical quality of elicited imitations between conditions. Older children performed better than young children in both experiments. It was concluded that pictured visual cues do not affect the syntactical and grammatical quality of language-normal and language-disordered children's elicited sentence imitations.     

Influence of certain clinical variables on black preschoolers'' nonstandard phonological and grammatical performance

The influence of socioeconomic background, sex, and clinicians' race on the frequency of implementation of nonstandard phonological and grammatical structures was examined in 72 black preschoolers. In order to generalize findings to typical clinical settings, language samples were elicited by 3 black and 3 white clinicians using spontaneous, paragraph completion, and sentence repetition procedures. Results showed that socioeconomic status and sex had a strong effect on black children's usage of nonstandard phonological and grammatical forms. More striking, data suggested that the beginnings of a bidialectal capability were identifiable in the clinical setting in four- and five-year-old black children. Discriminant analysis detailed those nonstandard phonological and grammatical forms which contributed to dialect differences between lower and middle-socioeconomic black children.     

Longitudinal relationships between lexical and grammatical development in typical and late-talking children.

PURPOSE: This study examined the longitudinal relationships between lexical and grammatical development in typically developing (TD) and late-talking children for the purposes of testing the single-mechanism account of language acquisition and comparing the developmental trajectories of lexical and grammatical development in late-talking and TD children. METHOD: Participants included 30 children identified as late talkers (LTs) at 2;0 (years;months), and 30 TD children matched on age, nonverbal cognition, socioeconomic status, and gender. Data were collected at 5 points between 2;0 and 5;6. RESULTS: Cross-lagged correlational analyses indicated that TD children showed evidence of bidirectional bootstrapping between lexical and grammatical development between 2;0 and 3;6. Compared with the TD group, LTs exhibited less evidence of syntactic bootstrapping. Linear mixed-effects modeling of language sample data suggested that the relationship between lexical and grammatical growth was similar for the 2 groups. CONCLUSION: Lexical and grammatical development were strongly related in both groups, consistent with the single-mechanism account of language acquisition. The results were mixed in terms of finding longitudinal differences in lexical-grammatical relationships between the TD and late-talking children; however, several analyses suggested that for late-talking children, syntactic growth may be less facilitative of lexical development.     

An analysis of individual differences in words stuttered

Six stutterers (two adults and four children between 12 and 14 years old) read 33 or more passages of prose of approximately 200 words, in sessions of 16 or 17 passages. Words were classified by initial phoneme, grammatical class, length, and position in sentence, and proportions of stutters were examined as a function of these variables. The extensive data allowed a detailed analysis of individual differences, with the following results. Five subjects showed the usual higher rate of stuttering on consonants, though there were differences in which consonants were stuttered most, and one subject showed more stuttering on vowels. A markedly higher rate was found on initial words of sentences in two subjects, and these two subjects were also exceptional in stuttering more on content than function words, and in showing a type of stutter characterized by blocks rather than repetitions. Possible explanations for this pattern are discussed. Contrary to Taylor (1966) there were significant correlations between stuttering and grammatical class even when initial phoneme and word in sentence were held constant. There were no significant changes within sessions. Two subjects showed a significant decrease between sessions, one showed an increase; these changes were due to familiarity with the experimental situation, rather than with passages per se.     

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.     

Speech intelligibility and prosody production in children with cochlear implants

ObjectivesThe purpose of the current study was to examine the relation between speech intelligibility and prosody production in children who use cochlear implants.MethodsThe Beginner's Intelligibility Test (BIT) and Prosodic Utterance Production (PUP) task were administered to 15 children who use cochlear implants and 10 children with normal hearing. Adult listeners with normal hearing judged the intelligibility of the words in the BIT sentences, identified the PUP sentences as one of four grammatical or emotional moods (i.e., declarative, interrogative, happy, or sad), and rated the PUP sentences according to how well they thought the child conveyed the designated mood.ResultsPercent correct scores were higher for intelligibility than for prosody and higher for children with normal hearing than for children with cochlear implants. Declarative sentences were most readily identified and received the highest ratings by adult listeners; interrogative sentences were least readily identified and received the lowest ratings. Correlations between intelligibility and all mood identification and rating scores except declarative were not significant.DiscussionThe findings suggest that the development of speech intelligibility progresses ahead of prosody in both children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing; however, children with normal hearing still perform better than children with cochlear implants on measures of intelligibility and prosody even after accounting for hearing age. Problems with interrogative intonation may be related to more general restrictions on rising intonation, and the correlation results indicate that intelligibility and sentence intonation may be relatively dissociated at these ages.Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, readers will be able to describe (1) methods for measuring speech intelligibility and prosody production in children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing, (2) the differences between children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants on measures of speech intelligibility and prosody production, and (3) the relations between speech intelligibility and prosody production in children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing.     

Acquisition of spoken and signed English by profoundly deaf children

A sample of 327 profoundly deaf children from oral/aural (OA) and total communication (TC) programs across the country was tested on the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level (GAEL-S), which measures production of selected English language structures. Results were analyzed separately for four different response modes: the oral productions of OA children, the oral productions of TC children, the manual productions of TC children, and the combined productions of TC children. Percentage correct scores for the oral productions of TC children were substantially below scores for their manual productions and below the scores of OA children in all grammatical categories sampled on the GAEL-S. The percentage correct scores of OA children were significantly higher than the manual and combined production scores of TC children in more than 50% of the grammatical categories. The manual scores of TC children significantly exceeded the scores of OA children in less than 20% of the categories. The gap between oral and manual production of the children in total communication programs indicates that spoken English did not develop simultaneously with manually coded English and that these children educated in programs using manually coded English did not develop competence with early developing English syntax at a rate faster than those not using signs.     

Grammaticality judgements of an extended optional infinitive grammar: evidence from English-speaking children with specific language impairment.

This study reports on the outcomes of an investigation designed to evaluate competing accounts of the nature of the grammatical limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) with a new comprehension measure involving well-formedness judgments. It is a follow-up to the longitudinal study of Rice, Wexler, and Hershberger (1998), which reported on the production of grammatical morphemes by young children with SLI and 2 control groups of children, one at equivalent levels of mean length of utterance at the outset of the study, the other of equivalent age. In this investigation, we report on grammaticality judgment measures collected from the same 3 groups of children over a period of 2 years for 5 times of measurement. It is the first longitudinal study of grammaticality judgments of children with SLI. The findings show that children's grammatical judgments parallel their productions: Children with SLI can make fine-tuned grammatical judgments to reject morphosyntactic errors they are unlikely to commit, whereas they accept morphosyntactic errors that they are likely to produce. The findings support the extended optional infinitive (EOI) account of morphosyntactic limitation based in underlying grammatical representations and do not support accounts of input processing deficits or production constraints.     

Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how measures of language productivity and organization in two languages converge with children's measured language abilities on the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA), a standardized measure of language ability. 170 kindergarten age children who produced narrative language samples in Spanish and in English based on a wordless picture book were included in the analysis. Samples were analyzed for number of utterances, number of different words, mean length of utterance, and percentage of grammatical utterances. The best predictors of language ability as measured by the BESA scores were English MLU, English grammaticality, and Spanish grammaticality. Results are discussed in relationship to the nature of the measures in each of the languages and in regard to their potential utility for identifying low language ability in bilingual. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will be able to identify (1) why narratives are useful for evaluating bilingual language ability, (2) which measures of productivity and sentence organization in narratives best capture language ability and development in bilingual children, (3) how a bilingual or composite language ability across two languages can be determined, and (4) what relationship exists between measures of productivity and sentence organization in each language with a bilingual language ability score.     

Some empirical observations about early stuttering: a possible link to language development

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be influenced by word-related factors; early stuttering seldom occurs on one-word utterances; the earliest age at which stuttering is reported is 18 months, with the beginning of grammatical development; the age at which most onset of stuttering is reported, 2-5 years, coincides with the period during which children acquire syntax; considerable spontaneous recovery takes place at the time most children have mastered syntax; incipient stuttering is influenced by the length and grammatical complexity of utterances; young children who stutter may be somewhat deficient in language skills; boys who stutter outnumber girls. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will learn about a number of empirical observations about incipient stuttering and how they may be explained by a syntax-based hypothesis about its etiology.     

3～4岁听障儿童与健听儿童句子记忆测试结果比较

目的：探讨3～4岁经康复训练的听障儿童与健听儿童通过听觉记忆句子能力的差异。方法选取24例3～4岁经康复训练的听障儿童及14例同龄健听儿童,听障儿童再按助听时间1～2年（10例）和2～3年（14例）分为两组,以言语听觉反应评估（evaluation of auditory response to speech,EARS）中封闭式句子测试的两组图片分别对各组儿童进行测试,比较听障及健听儿童通过听觉完整记忆句子的正确率及平均次数。结果在记忆两组测试句的正确率方面,助听时间2～3年听障儿童第一组测试句的正确率是57．14％,与健听儿童的正确率（58．93％）接近,助听时间1～2年听障儿童的语句的正确率仅为32．5％,低于其他两组儿童;助听时间2～3年听障儿童第二组测试句的正确率是44．64％,高于助听时间1～2年听障儿童的正确率（22．5％）,健听儿童的语句的正确率为55．36％,高于听障儿童组。健听、助听2～3年和助听1～2年听障儿童正确记忆第一组测试句的平均次数分别为2．36±1．08、2．29±1．68、1．30±1．25次,三组间差异无统计学意义（P＞0．05）,但是在第二组测试句测试中,助听1～2年的听障儿童正确记忆句子的次数（0．90±0．57次）明显低于健听儿童（2．21±0．89次）（P＜0．01）和助听2～3年听障儿童组（1．79±1．89次）（P＜0．05）,而助听2～3年的听障儿童组与健听儿童组之间差异无统计学意义（P＞0．05）。结论本组3～4岁听障儿童通过听觉正确记忆句子的能力随着助听时间的延长而提高,并逐渐接近同龄健听儿童,这一能力也受到测试内容的影响。     

Effects of sampling context on the finite verb production of children with and without delayed language development

Informal language sampling is ubiquitous in the study of developing grammatical abilities in children with and without delayed language, including study of grammatical abilities in the area of finite verb production. Finite verbs are particularly important to assess as they appear to be the grammatical morphemes most vulnerable to error in the language usage of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Although it is known that context and procedure of informal language sampling interact with language usage, this interaction has not been studied with regard to finite verb production for children with or without language delay. Therefore, this study examined the production of obligatory contexts for finite verbs, and the correct use of finite verb forms in these obligatory contexts, across four different language sampling contexts and procedures. Results revealed that finite verb production was sensitive to both group and context differences for preschool-age children with, and without, language impairment. LEARNING OUTCOMES: As a result of this activity, the reader should be able to: (1) describe the importance of assessing finite verb production in young children, (2) conceptualize processing demands as they relate to highly-structured versus less-structured, informal language sampling tasks, and (3) identify critical issues related to informal language sampling context effects on the finite verb production of young children.     

Changes in the probability of stuttering following a stutter: a test of some recent models

To test the models of stuttering proposed by Still and Sherrard (1976), six stutterers (two adults and four children between 12 and 14 years old) read 33 or more passages of prose of approximately 200 words, in sessions of 16 or 17 passages. Predictions tested concerned changes in stuttering probability as words elapse following the last stutter. Such changes may be confounded with sequential dependencies among word classes, together with correlations between word classes and stuttering. To allow for this, a multiple regression was carried out on six independent variables--initial phoneme, grammatical class, length of word, position in sentence, session, and familiarity of passage. From this analysis, predicted changes in stuttering probability were generated, and compared with observed probabilities. There was a significant decrease in the difference between observed and expected probabilities over the first 30 words following a stutter. Also, two subjects (the adults) showed an initial increase in rate of stuttering. These results support a combination of the anxiety and feedback models of Still and Sherrard.     

Within-clinic versus outside-of-clinic self-monitoring of articulation to promote generalization

The purpose of this study was to assess the generalization of correct articulation to nontreatment environments when self-monitoring procedures were implemented within versus outside of the clinic setting. Seven children who substituted /theta/ and /o/ for /s/ and /z/ participated in this study. Data were collected in the context of a multiple baseline design replicated across subjects. The children initially self-monitored their correct articulation during conversation in the clinic setting where treatment was implemented. Then, after varying intervals, self-monitoring outside of the clinic setting was introduced as well. The results showed that when the children monitored their speech within the clinic setting only, no generalization of correct target sound production outside of the clinic setting occurred. However, after the children were required to monitor their speech outside of the clinic setting, rapid and widespread generalization was measured. These results are discussed in relation to practical and theoretical implications. Additional data collected on number of responses, the accuracy of the children's monitoring, and the percentage of correct responses are also discussed.