Assessing Language Delay in Twins an, Lori G; Evans, Kelli J; Beverly, Brenda L
Infants and young children,
10/2021, Volume:
34, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Identification of language disorders in children younger than 3 years remains challenging despite agreement that early intervention improves outcomes. This study of twin language and gesture ...development substantiated the twinning effect, an unexplained lag in expressive and receptive language seen in twins, for a group of 88, 16- to 18-month-old twins who did not present with extreme perinatal risk. A valid, parent-report measure revealed word production of 10th percentile and less for 15 twins. Pregnancy complications, but not a positive family history of speech, language, or learning disorders or other case history factors, significantly increased the odds of this early expressive delay. The twinning effect was more pronounced for gesture than for spoken vocabulary: 29 twins fell below gesture norms. This was unexpected. Because gesture signals early communicative intentionality, twins with early expressive delay who present with limited gestures, with or without additional risk factors, warrant priority consideration for early intervention.
Adults naturally comment and pose questions during joint book reading (JBR), a recognized context for vocabulary acquisition. An original story containing 10 nonsense words mapped to novel referents ...was read to 40 typically developing preschoolers. Children who heard scripted questions and comments identified approximately two more words than children in a control group, and the groups who heard comments named more new words than the control and questions-only groups. Unlike investigations of synonym learning during JBR, comments appeared more effective than questions. Future research will address an exposure advantage for comments and extend results to children with language impairment.
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A well-known characteristic of children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a significant deficit in grammatical morphology production compared with younger, language-matched, typically ...developing children. This is true for present tense be (am, is, are), as well as other inflectional morphemes. However, grammatical morpheme learning by children with SLI may vary depending on developmental stage. Participants were 8 boys with SLI (42 to 58 months old with mean length of utterances MLUs less than or equal to 3.0 morphemes) and 14 MLU-matched controls (girls and boys; mean age of 27 months). These groups were younger and had lower MLUs than groups from oft-cited studies (e.g., Cleave & Rice, 1997; Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor, & Sabbadini, 1992; Leonard, Eyer, Bedore, & Grela, 1997; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998). The SLI group had a significantly higher percentage of be use in obligatory contexts (46%) than did the younger, typically developing children (27%). This pattern of better performance in grammatical morphology by SLI groups than controls has been reported. Ingram (1972) and Morehead and Ingram (1973) found similar results for children with language impairment in early-MLU stages. Although findings are presented with caution, they afford an opportunity to consider the nature of SLI. If SLI represents a general processing limitation, then that limitation might enable the language learner with SLI to acquire some initial morphological mappings with relative success. This apparent paradox, which also is evident in normal language acquisition, has been termed less is more by Newport (1990). Limited perception and memory force attention to smaller pieces of the input, and these constraints simplify the task for the language learner. SLI is compared with a chronically constrained system that initially assists the learner to achieve basic form-function mappings but ultimately hinders mastery of English morphology.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to determine whether typically developing children's temperament is associated with their awareness and emerging prejudice against stuttering. Method: ...The emotional reactivity and emotion regulation of 42 typically developing 3- to 7-year-old children were assessed using parent report of temperament (i.e., Children's Behavioral Questionnaire). Children viewed a video of two puppets, one with fluent speech and the other with nonfluent speech. Children were prompted to answer questions to assess their awareness of stuttering as well as their preference for fluent speech and negative evaluation of stuttering, with the latter two being combined to index children's emerging prejudice against stuttering. Results: Findings indicated that typically developing children's positive emotional reactivity was significantly associated with their verbally expressed awareness of stuttering. In addition, children's higher negative emotional reactivity was significantly associated with greater emerging prejudice against stuttering. Conclusion: Findings were taken to suggest that young typically developing children's emotional reactivity may play an important role in developing awareness of stuttering and prejudice against stuttering in their early years.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
17.
Addressing Literacy Lance, Dee M.; Beverly, Brenda L.; Evans, Lea Helen ...
Communication disorders quarterly,
12/2003, Volume:
25, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
As speech—language pathologists work more directly and in concert with educators to address reading problems in school-age children with language-based learning disabilities (LLD), knowledge of ...current methods in reading instruction will become critical. Eight methods found to be effective with typically developing children and children with LLD are outlined. Word identification is best trained using methods that rely upon knowledge of letter—sound correspondences in varying syllable contexts and word attack skills using letter—sound decoding and analogy. When learning reading comprehension, students benefit from methods that address vocabulary skills and text-level comprehension monitoring.
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8 preschoolers with specific language impairment (age range = 44–58 mo.) and 8 language-matched, typically developing toddlers (22–29 mo.) participated in a verb comprehension task to investigate ...sensitivity to auxiliary is in four contexts—grammatical (Who is pushing?), omitted (Who pushing?), ungrammatical (Who in pushing?), and nonsense (Who id pushing?). Analysis yielded a significant interaction: children with specific language impairment had the lowest comprehension in the ungrammatical context and typically developing children had the highest. Perhaps children with specific language impairment, but not younger typically developing children, were sensitive to grammatical co-occurrences. One explanation is that knowledge of morphosyntax exceeded production for children with specific language impairment. Moreover, typically developing children may have ignored morpheme anomalies, perhaps benefitting from other input cues or flexible sentence processing.
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Purpose:
Despite the reported high prevalence of dysphagia and reflux, patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are not routinely screened for dysphagia or reflux during conventional OSA ...management. The purpose of this exploratory study was to (a) identify prevalences of dysphagia and reflux self-reported symptoms in patients with OSA and (b) determine associations between dysphagia and reflux symptoms and demographic and clinical variables.
Method:
A chart review was completed on 75 patients with treated OSA during routine medical management at a university-affiliated sleep center. All participants completed the 10-Item Eating Assessment Tool (EAT-10) and Reflux Symptom Index (RSI) questionnaires, which are patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) of swallowing and reflux symptoms, respectively. Relevant demographic and clinical variables were extracted. A binary logistic regression was computed to examine the relationships between dysphagia and reflux PROMs and demographic and clinical variables.
Result:
Sixty-three participants met eligibility criteria (
M
age
= 64 years). In addition, 14% (
n
= 9) and 11% (
n
= 7) of patients with OSA syndrome reported swallowing and reflux symptoms, respectively. Among the demographic and clinical variables investigated, there were no significant predictive factors for EAT-10 scores. Age and apnea–hypopnea index were significant predictive factors for RSI scores.
Conclusions:
To our knowledge, this is the first preliminary study to investigate swallowing and reflux symptoms concurrently in OSA, as well as potential mitigating factors. Although our findings suggest a relatively low percentage of patients with OSA report dysphagia and reflux symptoms, the true prevalences of swallowing and reflux disorders may be higher based on previous evidence suggesting that pharyngeal afferent (sensory) dysfunction may cause patients to underestimate their symptoms.
Purpose: Phonics instruction with decodable texts reading practice was compared to alternate reading enrichments. Method: Thirty-two first-graders participated. One group practiced reading decodable ...texts after phonics instruction. Another group heard authentic literature read aloud, and the third group participated in phonics combined with authentic literature. Additionally an untreated classroom was compared to a treated classroom for a school-based reading measure, DIBELS. Results: Significant gains on DIBELS were found for the treated classroom compared to an untreated classroom following the semester of the enrichment. All treatment groups showed measurable reading gains, but the effect of the treatment text varied by reading level. Below-average readers demonstrated greater comprehension increases than average readers given phonics plus decodable texts, but average readers had greater improvements following authentic literature read aloud. Conclusions: Explicit phonics instruction and reading practice with decodable texts can be a prerequisite to successful comprehension for beginning readers; however, as readers advance, they are more likely to benefit from challenging and meaningful literature. Adapted from the source document
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
