Cause Of Specific Language Impairment Research Articles

Heather van der Lely and developmental language disorders: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue honours the work and memory of Heather van der Lely, who died of cancer on 17 February 2014, at the too-young age of 58. Heather pioneered the study of children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment using a range of innovative behavioural and neuroimaging methods, and became one of the best-known researchers in the field of developmental language disorders. When Heather left school at 16 with few qualifications, her severe dyslexia was still unrecognised. She was apparently told that she was only capable of working at a children’s day nursery near her home village in Herefordshire, UK. However, she had a genuine interest in children and their development, and within two years she was running the nursery. She then applied to train as a nursery nurse, which meant first going to night school to get A-levels. By the time she passed her A-levels, she had decided to become a speech and language therapist, which, of course, required a degree. She graduated from Birmingham City University three years later, with First Class honours. She worked as a speech and language therapist for two years before being accepted by the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, to study for a PhD. Her topic was sentence comprehension in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In 1990, as she was completing her PhD, she was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Given only months to live, she gave up work to enjoy what little time she had left. Thankfully, the tumour was misdiagnosed. A year later she was back at Birkbeck, in receipt of a post-doctoral fellowship from the British Academy which enabled her to continue studying the underlying nature and cause of SLI in children. A career-development fellowship from the Wellcome Trust followed. In 2001, she was offered the new

Association between temporal resolution and Specific Language Impairment: The role of nonsensory processing

IntroductionMany authors have suggested that a perceptual auditory disorder involving temporal processing is the primary cause of Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The aim of this study was to compare the performance of children with and without SLI on a temporal processing task controlling for the confounding of verbal short-term memory and working memory. MethodThirty participants with SLI aged 6 years were selected, along with 30 age- and gender-matched participants with typical language development. The Adaptive Test of Temporal Resolution (ATTR) was used to evaluate temporal resolution ability (an aspect of temporal processing), and the digit span subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children was used to evaluate auditory short-term memory and working memory. ResultsThe analysis of covariance showed that children with SLI performed significantly worse than children with typical language development on the temporal resolution task (ATTR), even when controlling for short-term memory and working memory. Statistically significant correlations between ATTR and digit span were found for the group of children with SLI but not for the children with typical language development. ConclusionChildren with SLI showed significantly worse temporal resolution ability than their peers with typical language development. Such differences cannot be attributed solely to the immediate memory deficit associated with SLI.

Teorías subjetivas de profesionales de escuelas de lenguaje en chile sobre el trastorno específico del lenguaje

OBJETIVO: comprender y reconstruir las teorías subjetivas de profesionales de escuelas de lenguaje en Chile, sobre las causas y el tratamiento del trastorno específico del lenguaje. MÉTODO: se utilizó métodos cualitativos para recolectar datos en profundidad. Se realizó entrevistas individuales semi-estructuradas con una muestra de cuatro fonoaudiólogas (logopedas) y cuatro educadoras diferenciales de cuatro escuelas de lenguaje. Se grabó y transcribió las entrevistas, las que fueron analizadas con el programa informático Atlas.ti 5.0. Los resultados del análisis relacional se sintetizaron en tres modelos. RESULTADOS: para las fonoaudiólogas y educadoras diferenciales las causas principales del trastorno específico del lenguaje son factores sociales, originados en la familia de los niños afectados. Con respeto a la superación de este trastorno las entrevistadas destacaron con alta importancia el apoyo familiar para un tratamiento eficaz. CONCLUSIONES: entre las explicaciones subjetivas de las profesionales entrevistadas y las explicaciones científicas acerca las causas del trastorno específico del lenguaje, existen diferencias. Mientras las entrevistadas hablan de causas sociales, los enfoques científicos explican este trastorno por causas biológicas. Esta diferencia debería ser investigada en estudios posteriores. Las fonoaudiólogas y educadoras diferenciales ven la familia del niño como una de las causas principales del trastorno específico del lenguaje y al mismo tiempo consideran el apoyo familiar como un requisito crucial en el tratamiento. En la opinión de los profesionales de las escuelas de lenguaje el trastorno específico del lenguaje es un trastorno superable, si escuela y familia trabajan en conjunto.

On the nature and cause of Specific Language Impairment: A view from sentence processing and infant research

This paper addresses the nature and cause of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) by reviewing recent research in sentence processing of children with SLI compared to typically developing (TD) children and research in infant speech perception. These studies have revealed that children with SLI are sensitive to syntactic, semantic, and real-world information, but do not show sensitivity to grammatical morphemes with low phonetic saliency, and they show longer reaction times than age-matched controls. TD children from the age of 4 show trace reactivation, but some children with SLI fail to show this effect, which resembles the pattern of adults and TD children with low working memory. Finally, findings from the German Language Development (GLAD) Project have revealed that a group of children at risk for SLI had a history of an auditory delay and impaired processing of prosodic information in the first months of their life, which is not detectable later in life. Although this is a single project that needs to be replicated with a larger group of children, it provides preliminary support for accounts of SLI which make an explicit link between an early deficit in the processing of phonology and later language deficits, and the Computational Complexity Hypothesis that argues that the language deficit in children with SLI lies in difficulties integrating different types of information at the interfaces.

Specific language impairment as systemic developmental disorders

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a disorder characterised by slow, abnormal language development. Most children with this disorder do not present any other cognitive or neurological deficits. There are many different pathological developmental profiles and switches from one profile to another often occur. An alternative would be to consider SLI as a generic name covering three developmental language disorders: developmental verbal dyspraxia, linguistic dysphasia, and pragmatic language impairment. The underlying cause of SLI is unknown and the numerous studies on the subject suggest that there is no single cause. We suggest that SLI is the result of an abnormal development of the language system, occurring when more than one part of the system fails, thus blocking the system's natural compensation mechanisms. Since compensation also hinders linguistic evaluation, one possibility for diagnosis and remediation control is to assess basic cognitive abilities by non-linguistic means whenever possible. Neurological plausible bases for language and language development should also be taken into account to offer new hypotheses and research issues for future work on SLI.

Genetic and environmental risks for specific language impairment in children

Specific language impairment (SLI) is the term used to refer to unexplained difficulties in language acquisition in children. Over the last decade, there has been rapid growth of evidence indicating that genes play an important part in the aetiology of SLI. However, further progress in elucidating the role of genes in causing SLI is limited by our lack of understanding of the phenotype. Studies to date have been hampered by the fact that we do not know whether SLI should be treated as a discrete disorder or a continuous variable, let alone which measures should be used to identify cases, or how many subtypes there are. Recent research suggests that theoretically motivated measures of underlying processes may be better than conventional clinical diagnoses for identifying aetiologically distinct types of language impairment. There has been a tendency for researchers to embrace parsimony and look for a single cause of SLI, or at any event, to identify different subtypes, each with a different single cause. Research is reviewed which suggests that this may not be a fruitful approach to SLI, and that an approach in terms of multiple risk and protective factors, which is widely adopted in medicine, is more realistic.

Genetic and environmental risks for specific language impairment in children

Specific language impairment (SLI) is the term used to refer to unexplained difficulties in language acquisition in children. Over the last decade, there has been rapid growth of evidence indicating that genes play an important part in the aetiology of SLI. However, further progress in elucidating the role of genes in causing SLI is limited by our lack of understanding of the phenotype. Studies to date have been hampered by the fact that we do not know whether SLI should be treated as a discrete disorder or a continuous variable, let alone which measures should be used to identify cases, or how many subtypes there are. Recent research suggests that theoretically motivated measures of underlying processes may be better than conventional clinical diagnoses for identifying aetiologically distinct types of language impairment. There has been a tendency for researchers to embrace parsimony and look for a single cause of SLI, or at any event, to identify different subtypes, each with a different single cause. Research is reviewed that suggests that it may not be a fruitful approach to SLI, and that an approach in terms of multiple risk and protective factors, which is widely adopted in medicine, is more realistic.

Genetic and environmental risks for specific language impairment in children.

Specific language impairment (SLI) is the term used to refer to unexplained difficulties in language acquisition in children. Over the past decade, there has been rapid growth of evidence indicating that genes play an important part in the aetiology of SLI. However, further progress in elucidating the role of genes in causing SLI is limited by our lack of understanding of the phenotype. Studies to date have been hampered by the fact that we do not know whether SLI should be treated as a discrete disorder or a continuous variable, let alone which measures should be used to identify cases, or how many subtypes there are. Recent research suggests that theoretically motivated measures of underlying processes may be better than conventional clinical diagnoses for identifying aetiologically distinct types of language impairment. There has been a tendency for researchers to embrace parsimony and look for a single cause of SLI-or in any event, to identify different subtypes, each with a different single cause. Research is reviewed that suggests that may not be a fruitful approach to SLI, and that an approach in terms of multiple risk and protective factors, which is widely adopted in medicine, is more realistic.

Examining the Cause of Specific Language Impairment

In contrast with Leonard (in this clinical forum), I believe understanding the cause of specific-language impairment is an important issue in the study of this condition. A model of language impairment that contains two primary sources of causation is proposed and then applied to the problem of specific-language impairment. Further, Leonard is interpreted as proposing that specific-language impairment is caused by the same factors as those that cause normal variation in language function. In light of this, a method of testing this hypothesis is provided.