Language-disabled Children Research Articles

Support system for pronunciation instruction and practice in special education classes for language-disabled children enrolled in conventional schools

We developed two types of support systems for pronunciation instruction and practice in special education classes for language-disabled children: a stand-alone system and a web application system. The aims of the systems were (1) to encourage students to practice the pronunciation they learned in their classes repeatedly and (2) to promote cooperation between teachers and the speech-language-hearing therapists (STs) who support the teachers. The teachers registered practice words and their probable error pronunciations into the system, taking into account individual pronunciation needs, and the students were encouraged to read these practice words aloud. Three speech evaluation methods were prepared: automatic speech recognition, phonemic discrimination between the correct and probable error pronunciation of a consonant period, and articulation tests from STs. The web application system simplified access to the students’ speech and exercise records for the STs. Practical field test results demonstrated th...

Naming Difficulties in Language-Disabled Children

The "tip of the tongue" (TOT) paradigm in a picture-naming task was presented to 14 children with language disabilities (LD) and 14 children without language disabilities (ND). Although the two groups did not differ in the semantic information they had on words they could not fully retrieve, the LD children had less valid and more invalid phonological information. They also had fewer correct responses and spontaneous recalls, more "Don't Know" s (DK) and TOTs, and less accurate "feeling of knowing" (FOK) judgments. These results, demonstrating dissociation between the semantic and phonological levels of word representation, support a two-stage model of word retrieval. These findings are evidence in favor of a phonological treatment approach for naming problems in LD children.

Auditory-Pointing Task Performance of Children Aged 6;0

An Auditory-Pointing Span task was developed and then trialled with 43 language-normal, prep children aged 6;0 and with 8 language-disabled children. The language-disabled group performed below the prep mean. There were also differences in the factors underlying the two groups' performance. The Auditory-Pointing Span task appears to be a useful item in a battery of language tests.

Grammatical awareness in the spoken and written language of language-disabled children.

Experiments examined grammatical judgement, and error-identification deficits in relation to expressive language skills and to morphemic errors in writing. Language-disabled subjects did not differ from language-matched controls on judgement, revision, or error identification. Age-matched controls represented more morphemes in elicited writing than either of the other groups, which were equivalent. However, in spontaneous writing, language-disabled subjects made more frequent morphemic errors than age-matched controls, but language-matched subjects did not differ from either group. Proficiency relative to academic experience and oral language status and to remedial implications are discussed.

Equivalence class formation in language-able and language-disabled children.

Stimulus equivalence seems to have relevance to the study of semantics and of language more generally. If so, there may be a relation between language use and the demonstration of stimulus equivalence. This was examined in three groups of children ranging in chronological age and matched on a conventional measure of mental age: normally developing preschoolers, retarded children who used speech or signs spontaneously and appropriately, and retarded children who did not. All children were taught a series of four related discriminations and were then tested to determine if classes of equivalent stimuli had formed. All of the language-able children (retarded and normal) formed equivalence classes, whereas none of the language-disabled children did so. Although the exact nature of the relation between stimulus equivalence and language remains to be clarified, these results support the view that stimulus equivalence is a phenomenon with relevance to language.

Anticipatory imagery ability in normal and language-disabled children.

The literature on cognitive functioning of language-disabled children suggests that they exhibit specific disabilities in nonlinguistic as well as linguistic domains. These disabilities have been hypothesized to be related to deficits in cognitive representational ability. Anticipatory imagery and spatial representation have been reported as two nonlinguistic representational areas in which language-disordered children are deficient. The present study compared normal and language-disabled children on spatial representation tasks involving anticipatory imagery. Five spatial tasks were administered to two groups of 7 1/2-9 1/2-year-old children matched on sex, age, native language, and racial background. One group included 18 language-disabled children and the other group 18 children with normal language development. The language-disabled were less accurate than the normal children on all tasks which involved anticipation or prediction of mental rotations, movements, or other transformations. The results of this study suggest difficulty with dynamic cognitive representation in the linguistic and nonlinguistic deficits demonstrated by language-disabled children.

Exploring the oral and written language errors made by language disabled children

Clinical observation of children who exhibit both oral and written language disabilities has suggested that there may be parallels in their error patterns in speaking, reading, and writing that merit further investigation. The similarities are apparent in the problems these children have in many aspects of linguistic function in word retrieval, morphology, phonology, and syntax. Thus, these children substitute "potato" for tomato in speaking, reading, and writing. They omit grammatical tense or plural markers when speaking and do the same when reading and writing. They order the sounds incorrectly when speaking certain words and also when reading and writing them. The word order they use is often faulty across these tasks. Functor words are used incorrectly whether they are spoken, read, or written. Similar observations have been made by other investigators who have noted that oral language deficits are often reflected in the written language behavior of language disabled children (Cicci, 1980). However, the nature of such a relationship has yet to be systematically investigated. This study is the initial step in such an investigation. It proposes to analyze the picture naming errors made by language disabled children and to examine the relationship of these errors to their performance on written language tasks. Picture naming was selected as the stimulus material since research with other populations (Denckla and Rudel, 1976; Goodglass, 1980; Jansky and deHirsch, 1972; Katz, 1982; Wolf, 1981) has found it to be an informative starting point. Because the field is relatively uncharted, it was first necessary to determine whether a naming problem indeed existed in these children. It

The speech of language-disabled children

Among children who exhibit difficulties with reading and other academic skills are some who, during their preschool years, had considerable problems in acquiring spoken language. Often these problems are still evident during the early elementary school years and they may persist, in more subtle ways, through early adolescence and into early adulthood. Since certain skills, such as reading, are based on linguistic knowledge, it is important for us to know the kinds of linguistic difficulties these children experience prior to their school entrance — difficulties in the acquisition, comprehension, and use of spoken language. In this paper, I review a number of findings about the speech of language-disabled children.

An Approach to Mainstreaming Language-Disabled Children in the Elementary School

In 1972 a program was developed in Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland, to provide daily resource remediation to elementary school-age children with language handicaps. In accord with the Maryland’s guidelines for language and speech disabilities, the general goal of the program was to provide remediation that enabled children with language problems to increase their abilities in the comprehension or production of oral language. Although self-contained language classrooms and itinerant speech-language pathology programs existed, the resource program was designed to fill a gap in the continuum of services provided by the speech and language department.