Grammatical Specific Language Impairment Research Articles

Adversity Exposure, Syntax, and Specific Language Impairment: An Exploratory Study.

Children exposed to adversity (e.g., chronic poverty, traumatic events, and maltreatment) are at increased risk for performing below age expectations on norm-referenced language assessments, but it is unknown whether the risk is higher for specific language impairment (SLI). This exploratory study investigated whether adversity exposure is associated with reduced grammar knowledge and SLI. The syntax subtest of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Norm-Referenced (DELV-NR) assessment was administered to 30 school-age children with known histories of adversity exposure. Their primary caregiver also completed a comprehensive adversity exposure measure, which captured adverse event type, frequency, chronicity, and severity. Analyses included t tests, correlations, Mann-Whitney U tests, and chi-square. Overall, the sample performed below age expectations on the DELV-NR Syntax subtest, and a higher percentage of participants (20%) met diagnostic criteria for SLI than expected. The SLI and typical language (TL) groups did not significantly differ in adversity dosage, frequency, chronicity, or severity; however, participants in the SLI group were 1.46 times more likely to have experienced physical trauma than the participants in the TL group. Children with known histories of adversity exposure presented with grammatical deficits and SLI more often than expected based on the DELV-NR normative sample; however, features of the adverse event did not associate with SLI status except for exposure to physical trauma (e.g., physical abuse and victimization). Future research is needed to investigate the prevalence and potential causal pathways of SLI in this population. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20483706.

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

Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

Irregular past tense forms in English: how data from children with specific language impairment contribute to models of morphology

Two cognitive models of inflectional morphology are widely debated in the literature—the Words and Rules model, whereby irregular forms are stored in the lexicon but regular forms are created by rule, and Single Mechanism models, whereby both regulars and irregulars form an associative network, with no rules. A newer model, the Computational Grammatical Complexity (CGC) model, recognises the contribution of hierarchical complexity in three components of the grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, to the construction of morphologically complex forms. This model has previously been tested for regular past tense inflection in English, and in this study we test its predictions for the English irregular past tense, in four groups of children: a group with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI; aged 9;8–17;8), and three groups of typically developing children (aged 5;4–8;5). Children with G-SLI provide an important test case for the CGC model because they have deficits in syntax, morphology and phonology. As predicted, children with G-SLI produced fewer tense-marked irregulars than expected for their age, and fewer over-regularisations than their language-matched controls. The effect of verb-end phonology on over-regularisation and null-marking errors was the same for all groups: both G-SLI and typically developing children were more likely to over-regularise verbs ending in a vowel, and more likely to null-mark verbs ending in an alveolar consonant. We interpret these results as providing further support for the CGC model.

Specific language impairment in Turkish: Evidence from case morphology in Turkish–German successive bilinguals

Language disorders, and Specific Language Impairment (SLI), have been extensively studied in a number of different, though thus far almost exclusively Indoeuropean, languages. For other languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, or Arabic, however, findings on the outcome of SLI are rare. In this context, the growing number of migrant children in European countries with a variety of first languages can be seen as a challenge to linguistics and to language assessment: The lack of empirical findings on SLI in these languages brings up the question of how the impairment is manifested in bilingual children with a migrant background. In order for a language disorder to correctly be labelled SLI, it needs to be identified in both languages. This paper presents findings from a study examining the grammatical features of Turkish first language acquisition in Germany, while focusing on Turkish case morphology. For this purpose, it compares the data of three typically-developing children and two children with deviant language development. Moreover, it presents a first interpretation of the outcome of grammatical SLI in bilingual Turkish children and discusses suggestions for diagnostic assessment procedures.

Phonological complexity and prosodic structure in assessment of Serbian phonological development

In this research we investigate the relevance of phonological parameters in acquisition of Serbian language. Implementation of British Test of Phonological Screeing (TOPhS, van der Lely and Harris, 1999) has revealed that phonological complexity (syllabic and metrical structure) influences accuracy in non-word repetition task and could be used in assessment of phonological development of typically developing children, as well as of children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) (van der Lely and Harris, 1999; Gallon, Harris & van der Lely, 2007). Having in mind phonological properties of Serbian language (Zec, 2000, 2007), we hypothesized that several parameters can be used in assessment of phonological development in Serbian: a. onset (consonants cluster at the beginning of syllable; b. rime (consonant at the end of syllable). c. word of three syllables, and d. placement of stressed syllable in a word. Combination of these parameters gave us a list of 96 pseudo words of different levels of complexity. Participants were 14 adults and 30 children from kindergarten divided into three age groups (3, 4 and 5 years). Task for the participants was to loudly repeat every pseudo-word, and their reproduction was recorded. Transcription of their answers and coding of errors allowed us to analyze impact of different parameters on accuracy of phonological reproduction in children of different ages. The results indicate that the ability for reproduction of Serbian phonological properties develops in early preschool period. The most difficult is cluster of consonants at the beginning of syllable, and consonant at the end of syllable. These two parameters are even more difficult for reproduction in three-syllable words or in words that have more then one parameter marked. Placement of stress in a word is acquired even before 3 years. In other words, the results have shown that investigated features could be good indicators in assessment of early phonological development of typically developing children. Delay in their acquisition could reveal possible developmental difficulties.

Backward and Simultaneous Masking in Children With Grammatical Specific Language Impairment: No Simple Link Between Auditory and Language Abilities

We investigated claims that specific language impairment (SLI) typically arises from nonspeech auditory deficits by measuring tone-in-noise thresholds in a relatively homogeneous SLI subgroup exhibiting a primary deficit restricted to grammar (Grammatical[G]-SLI). Fourteen children (mostly teenagers) with G-SLI were compared to age-, vocabulary-, and grammar-matched control children on their abilities to detect a brief tone in quiet and in the presence of a masking noise. The tone occurred either simultaneously with the noise or just preceding it (backward masking). Maskers with and without a spectral notch allowed estimates of frequency selectivity. Group thresholds for the G-SLI children were never worse than those obtained for younger controls but were higher in both backward and simultaneous masking than in age-matched controls. However, more than half of the G-SLI group (8/14) were within age-appropriate limits for all thresholds. Frequency selectivity in the G-SLI group was normal. Within control and G-SLI groups, no threshold correlated with measures of vocabulary, grammar, or phonology. Nor did the language deficit in the G-SLI children vary with the presence or absence of auditory deficits. The auditory processing deficits sometimes found in children with SLI appear unlikely to cause or maintain the language impairment.

Recognition of gated verbs by children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment: Effects of inflection and frequency

A common feature of language disorders, particularly in English, is an impairment in inflectional morphology. One view claims that this deficit is caused by impaired speech processing and resulting impoverished phonological representations. We investigated the accuracy of spoken word recognition in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) using a successive forward gating paradigm, with target verbs manipulated for frequency and past tense inflection. Children with Grammatical-SLI were compared to age and language controls. We scored responses according to (1) proportion of gates to the first correct response, (2) proportion of gates to the first of three consistently correct responses. G-SLI children generally performed at the same level as age and vocabulary controls, although worse than age controls on uninflected verbs with respect to the second criterion, indicating that they activated the correct word at the same point, but took longer to reach a consistent response. Low frequency and inflection of the target word did not disadvantage G-SLI children to a greater extent than any of their controls. These results do not support the hypothesis that G-SLI children's morphological impairment is caused by poor acoustic-phonetic processing.

Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung im Kontext kindlicher Mehrsprachigkeit - Ergebnisse zur Kasusmorphologie in der Erstsprache Türkisch

Im Zusammenhang mit der stetig steigenden Zahl von mehrsprachigen Kindern in Deutschland ist die Frage nach dem Zusammenwirken von spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung (SSES) und Mehrsprachigkeit überaus relevant für die Diagnostik. Um eine SSES eindeutig diagnostizieren zu können, muss die Spracherwerbsproblematik in beiden Sprachen festgestellt werden. Für die Praxis ist das schwierig, da für viele der Erstsprachen von mehrsprachigen Kindern wenig oder keine Studien vorliegen, die eine grammatische Sprachentwicklungsstörung charakterisieren. Wir präsentieren Ergebnisse aus einer Studie, die grammatische Aspekte des Türkischen im Erstspracherwerb in Deutschland untersucht. Die vorliegende Auswertung konzentriert sich auf die türkische Kasusmorphologie. Dazu werden die Daten von je zwei auffälligen und zwei unauffälligen Kindern vorgestellt und diskutiert. Konsequenzen für die diagnostische Praxis werden aufgezeigt, auch wenn diese nur sehr vorläufig sein können.

Non‐word repetition: An investigation of phonological complexity in children with Grammatical SLI

We investigate whether children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G‐SLI) are also phonologically impaired and, if so, what the nature of that impairment is. We focus on the prosodic complexity of words, based on their syllabic and metrical (stress) structure, and investigate this using a novel non‐word repetition procedure, the Test of Phonological Structure (TOPhS). Participants with G‐SLI (aged 12–20 years) were compared to language‐matched, typically developing children (aged 4–8 years). The results reveal that, in contrast to the controls, the accuracy with which the G‐SLI group repeated non‐words decreased as prosodic complexity increased, even in non‐words with only one‐ and two‐syllables. The study indicates that, in G‐SLI, complexity deficits in morphology and syntax can extend to prosodic phonology. The study highlights the importance of taking into account prosodic complexity in phonological assessment and the design of non‐word repetition procedures.

Derivational morphology in children with Grammatical‐Specific Language Impairment

Although it is well‐established that children with Specific Language Impairment characteristically optionally inflect forms that require tense and agreement marking, their abilities with regards to derivational suffixation are less well understood. In this paper we provide evidence from children with Grammatical‐Specific Language Impairment (G‐SLI) that derivational suffixes, unlike tense and agreement suffixes, are not omitted in elicitation tasks. We investigate two types of derivation – comparative/superlative formation and adjective‐from‐noun formation – and reveal that G‐SLI children supply these suffixes at high rates, equivalent to their language matched peers. Moreover, increasing the phonological or morphological complexity of the stimulus does not trigger suffix omission, although it results in non‐target forms that are not characteristic of typically developing children. We discuss what these results reveal about the nature of the deficit in G‐SLI within the context of three hypotheses of SLI: the Extended Optional Infinitive, Implicit Rule and Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypotheses.

Passive verb morphology: The effect of phonotactics on passive comprehension in typically developing and Grammatical-SLI children

In this study we explore the impact of a morphological deficit on syntactic comprehension. A self-paced listening task was designed to investigate passive sentence processing in typically developing (TD) children and children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). Participants had to judge whether the sentence they heard matched a picture they were shown. Working within the framework of the Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypothesis, which stresses how different components of the grammar interact, we tested whether children were able to use phonotactic cues to parse reversible passive sentences of the form the X was verbed by Y. We predicted that TD children would be able to use phonotactics to parse a form like touched or hugged as a participle, and hence interpret passive sentences correctly. This cue is predicted not be used by G-SLI children, because they have difficulty building complex morphological representations. We demonstrate that indeed TD, but not G-SLI, children are able to use phonotactics cues in parsing passive sentences.

The Morpho-Phonological Interfacein Specific Language Impairment

This thesis investigates the nature of the interface between two components of language-morphology and phonology-in English-speaking children with grammatical-specific language impairment (G-SLI) compared to those with typi cally developing language. Children with G-SLI have previously been shown to be impaired in forming and comprehending syntactically complex structures (e.g., passives, pronominal binding). They also have the past-tense deficit that is char acteristic of SLI in English, producing bare stem forms in obligatory past-tense contexts (van der Lely (1998), van der Lely and Ullman (2001)). This is despite nonverbal abilities in the normal range and an absence of hearing, auditory proc essing, or articulatory deficits that could account for the language deficit (van der Lely, Rosen, and Adlard (2004)). To date, however, phonological skills in G-SLI children have not been investigated. Furthermore, the past-tense deficit, inter preted by van der Lely and Ullman as an impairment in using a suffixation rule, has been interpreted by other authors as having a phonological basis (e.g., Joanisse and Seidenberg (1998)). In this thesis I investigate the nature of the phonological deficit in G-SLI and establish that phonology does indeed impact on past-tense inflection but that this is in addition to specific deficits in syntax and inflectional morphology. G-SLI children between 9 and 16 years old were compared to typically developing chil dren between 4 and 12 years old. In a set of experiments I show the following for G-SLI children:

Grammatical language impairment and the specificity of cognitive domains: relations between auditory and language abilities

Grammatical-specific language impairment (G-SLI) in children, arguably, provides evidence for the existence of a specialised grammatical sub-system in the brain, necessary for normal language development. Some researchers challenge this, claiming that domain-general, low-level auditory deficits, particular to rapid processing, cause phonological deficits and thereby SLI. We investigate this possibility by testing the auditory discrimination abilities of G-SLI children for speech and non-speech sounds, at varying presentation rates, and controlling for the effects of age and language on performance. For non-speech formant transitions, 69% of the G-SLI children showed normal auditory processing, whereas for the same acoustic information in speech, only 31% did so. For rapidly presented tones, 46% of the G-SLI children performed normally. Auditory performance with speech and non-speech sounds differentiated the G-SLI children from their age-matched controls, whereas speed of processing did not. The G-SLI children evinced no relationship between their auditory and phonological/grammatical abilities. We found no consistent evidence that a deficit in processing rapid acoustic information causes or maintains G-SLI. The findings, from at least those G-SLI children who do not exhibit any auditory deficits, provide further evidence supporting the existence of a primary domain-specific deficit underlying G-SLI.

Wh-Movement in Children with Grammatical SLI: A Test of the RDDR Hypothesis

This article presents a test of the proposal that a subgroup of children with GRAMMATICAL-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT (G-SLI) have optional movement (the REPRESENTATIONAL DEFICIT FOR DEPENDENT RELATIONS (RDDR) account, van der Lely 1998) by investigating wh-movement in fifteen G-SLI subjects and twenty-four younger children matched on language abilities (LA controls). The RDDR/optional movement account predicts that G-SLI subjects would have deficits with both wH-operator and Q-feature movement and therefore would have particular problems producing object questions. We elicited 36 questions balanced for subject and object questions and WH-words (who, which, what). The G-SLI subjects were significantly impaired in producing WH-questions, showing particular difficulties with object questions in relation to the control children. The majority of G-SLI subjects (80%) evinced both wh-operator and T/Q-feature movement errors whereas only one control child (4%) did so, yet on occasion all the G-SLI subjects used appropriate movement operations to satisfy the wh-criterion. We conclude that the RDDR account whereby movement is optional is consistent with the findings of correct and incorrect wh-question formation. Thus, this first test of the RDDR account of G-SLI is supported by the findings. We discuss the possible underlying nature of a grammar that could cause such optionality, the implications for normal and impaired language acquisition, and the generalizability of the findings to other groups of children with SLI. We propose that in the face of no movement, the wh-word and, on occasion, do are merged in situ in the CP, and function as an interrogative adjunct.

Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of developmental language impairment?

Grammatical specific language impairment (G-SLI) has been proposed as a distinct subtype of language impairment. We assessed a large sample of twins between the ages of 7 and 13 years on language comprehension tests sensitive to G-SLI. The sample included 37 same-sex twin pairs selected for the presence of language impairment (LI) in one or both twins and 104 twin pairs from the general population. The number and patterns of errors in those with LI replicated findings from previous studies of G-SLI. Qualitative markers of G-SLI were derived from the tests. Out of 144 children for whom complete data were available, 2 scored positive on all five markers and 9 scored positive on four of the five markers. Most children who made grammatical errors characteristic of G-SLI had co-occurring deficits in other areas. These results raise questions for theories that treat this disorder as an all-or-none modular deficit.

Lexical word formation in children with grammatical SLI: a grammar-specific versus an input-processing deficit?

An ongoing controversy is whether an input-processing deficit or a grammar-specific deficit causes specific language impairment (SLI) in children. Previous studies have focussed on SLI childrens' omission of inflectional morphemes or impaired performance on language tasks, but such data can be accounted for by either theory. To distinguish between these theories we study compound formation in a subgroup of SLI children with ‘grammatical (G)-SLI’. An input-processing account (e.g. Leonard, L. (1998). Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), in which perception and production of inflections requires extra processing resources, would predict that G-SLI children will omit the regular plural -s in compounds (e.g. rat-eater). A grammar-specific deficit account (e.g. Ullman, M. & Gopnik, M. (1994) The production of inflectional morphology in hereditary specific language impairment. The McGill Working Papers in Linguistics, 10, 81–118; van der Lely, H. K. J. & Ullman, M. (1996). The computation and representation of past-tense morphology in normally developing and specifically language impaired children. In A. Stringfellow, D. Cahana-Amitay, E. Hughes & A. Zukowski, Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 816–827). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press), in which G-SLI children are impaired in regular inflectional morphology, would predict that G-SLI children will produce regular plural -s forms inside compounds (e.g. * rats-eater). We compared the responses of 16 G-SLI subjects (aged 10 years 4 months to 18 years) with those of 36 normally developing control children (24 matched on language ability and 12 matched on age and cognitive ability). All the groups produced irregular plural nouns in compounds ( mice-eater). The normally developing children and teenagers rarely, if ever, produced regular plural nouns inside compounds (* rats-eater), whereas the G-SLI subjects did so often. This pattern of results conflicts with the predictions of the input-processing deficit account. The findings support the grammar-specific deficit hypothesis. The data provide further evidence that specialized grammatical abilities may be differentially impaired within the language system.

Grammatical Characteristics of a Spanish-English Bilingual Child with Specific Language Impairment

These case studies describe and compare the language characteristics of two bilingual children: one with specific language impairment (SLI) and one with normal language development (NL). Using spontaneous language sampling, we found that the linguistic skills of the bilingual child with SLI were qualitatively different from those of the NL child across languages. The child with SLI produced significantly more morphosyntactic errors and less variety of grammatical forms and sentence types in both languages as compared to the NL child. In addition, some of those errors were different from those typically produced by monolingual children with SLI or speakers of English as a second language. Furthermore, the bilingual child with SLI demonstrated significant first- language loss. These findings support the hypothesis that there are cross-linguistic variations of grammatical SLI markers, and they highlight the importance of early intervention in preventing first-language loss. Moreover, the findings suggest that clinicians should expect morphosyntactic differences between monolingual and bilingual children with SLI.

SLI in Children: Movement, Economy, and Deficits in the Computational-Syntactic System

The linguistic characteristics of a boy (AZ) with specific language impairment (SLI) are presented. AZ illustrates the linguistic characteristics of Grammatical SLI. Morphosyntactic investigations reveal that all inflectional forms are present but are not used consistently. The impairment extends to syntactically complex utterances involving embedded structures at phrase and clause level and to arguments and wh-movement. There is true optionality in AZ's grammar. I propose that optional movement characterizes Grammatical SLI. Based on the Representation Deficit for Dependent Relationships account, I claim that the underlying deficit causing optional movement is in the syntactic computational system. A deficit in the operation, Move F, was not supported. A deficit with Economy (R. Manzini, personal communication, January 1998) was considered. I argue that Last Resort may be viewed as comprising two principles: Economy 1 ensures that the operation Move F is only permitted if it satisfies an appropriate feature-checking relation; Economy 2 forces movement of unchecked features. Hence, movement is obligatory. The data do not support a deficit with Economy 1. I propose that Economy 2 is missing in SLI grammar and this deficit causes optional movement. I provide an explanation of how the proposed characterization and underlying deficit can account for the range of syntactic findings for children with Grammatical SLI.

Resultative VPs and Specific Language Impairment

It has been proposed that grammatical specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular to the structure of the verb phrase (VP) with resultative secondary predication. The results of two video elicitation tasks showed children with SLI to have a significant deficit on such VP constructions compared with chronological age matches and younger vocabulary matches. These findings are accounted for by the deficit in dependency relations proposed by van der Lely (1996) to the effect that nonbinary syntactic dependencies are vulnerable in grammatical SLI. Additionally, it is shown that research using mean length of utterance matching of children with SLI may obscure syntactic problems revealed by matching with younger children on another language trait.