Language Learning Impairments Research Articles

Baseline EEG in the first year of life: Preliminary insights into the development of autism spectrum disorder and language impairments

Early identification of neurodevelopmental disorders is important to ensure a prompt and effective intervention, thus improving the later outcome. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and language learning impairment (LLI) are among the most common neurodevelopmental disorders, and they share overlapping symptoms. This study aims to characterize baseline electroencephalography (EEG) spectral power in 6- and 12-month-old infants at higher likelihood of developing ASD and LLI, compared to typically developing infants, and to preliminarily verify if spectral power components associated with the risk status are also linked with the later ASD or LLI diagnosis. We found risk status for ASD to be associated with reduced power in the low-frequency bands and risk status for LLI with increased power in the high-frequency bands. Interestingly, later diagnosis shared similar associations, thus supporting the potential role of EEG spectral power as a biomarker useful for understanding pathophysiology and classifying diagnostic outcomes.

NARRATIVE COMPETENCE: A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF STORYTELLING IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The aim of this research is to determine the characteristics of storytelling in preschool children. The study included 60 children, aged four, five and six years. The characteristics of the narration of a story on the macrolinguistic and microlinguistic plane were assessed by applying the Comic story task (Kostić, Vladisavljević & Popović, 1983).The results of the macrolinguistic structure of storytelling showed that focus in four and five-year-olds is in describing the introductory event and the activities leading to a goal. In contrast, with six-year-old children story patterns exist at a cognitive level, since the elements of the comic story are consistently described in just slightly less than half of the them.The results of the microlinguistic structure of storytelling showed that the four-year-olds stories predominantly contain simple sentences, while simple-extended and dependent-complex syntactic constructions dominate in the stories of five-year-olds. In contrast, there is a tendency in six-year-olds to use complex (consecutive, dependent) sentences. Storytelling in children develops gradually over the preschool period, so instructions for storytelling is important for all children, especially for those at risk for or with language learning impairments.

Visual Implicit Learning Abilities in Infants at Familial Risk for Language and Learning Impairments.

The ability of infants to track transitional probabilities (Statistical Learning—SL) and to extract and generalize high-order rules (Rule Learning—RL) from sequences of items have been proposed as being pivotal for the acquisition of language and reading skills. Although there is ample evidence of specific associations between SL and RL abilities and, respectively, vocabulary and grammar skills, research exploring SL and RL as early markers of language and learning (dis)abilities is still scarce. Here we investigated the efficiency of visual SL and RL skills in typically developing (TD) seven-month-old infants and in seven-month-old infants at high risk (HR) for language learning impairment. Infants were tested in two visual-habituation tasks aimed to measure their ability to extract transitional probabilities (SL task) or high-order, repetition-based rules (RL task) from sequences of visual shapes. Post-habituation looking time preferences revealed that both TD and HR infants succeeded in learning the statistical structure (SL task), while only TD infants, but not HR infants, were able to learn and generalize the high-order rule (RL task). These findings suggest that SL and RL may contribute differently to the emergence of language learning impairment and support the hypothesis that a mechanism linked to the extraction of grammar structures may contribute to the disorder.

Descriptive study of young disabled children aged 2–6, enrolled in mainstream schools, and benefiting from special needs assistants in the Bouches-du-Rhône in 2014

BackgroundSince the law of February 11, 2005, in France, the number of children with disabilities enrolled in ordinary schools has increased steadily. As a result, the amount of personal support provided by a special needs assistant (personal support) is also increasing. The aim of the study was to describe the diseases and impairments of disabled children aged 2–6, enrolled in mainstream schools and benefiting from personal support for schooling by special needs assistants in the Bouches-du-Rhône (France) in 2014. MethodsA cross-sectional descriptive study was performed. Children included were benefiting from either an individual or shared personal support. Physicians from the territorial organization in charge of disability coded diseases and deficiencies using the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, and nomenclature inspired by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. ResultsMedical data were coded for 990 children out of 1260 of the total population. These young disabled children were most frequently children with pervasive developmental disorders (23.3%), lack of expected normal physiological development (19.9%), or mixed specific developmental disorders (13.5%), and most often had behavioral, personality, and relational skills disorders (61.8%), psychomotor function impairments (51.9%), or written or oral language learning impairment (43.2%). Finally, the two main types of impairments most represented among these children were psychological impairments (86.7%) and language and speech impairments (79.8%). The children were most often supported by an individual personal support (for one child only) than by a shared personal support (60% vs. 40%). They were mainly boys (almost 75%). ConclusionThis study provides working guidelines for the management of health policies relating to disability at the territorial or even national level.

Impact of traumatic brain injury on cognitive functions

In this systematic review, we summarize the current understanding and controversies on cognitive sequelae after traumatic brain injury (TBI) to understand the cognitive deficits such as memory, attention, executive functions, and unawareness of their deficits in TBI patients. This review presents the cognitive sequel of patients with moderate-to-severe TBI by a comprehensive focused conglomeration of research publications by searching various resources. A search strategy with specific inclusion criteria was performed in PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, and the WHO Global Health Library. This review noted that TBI is related with increase of various neurological and non-neurological disorders including problems with attention, inability to concentrate, speech and language dysfunctions, learning and memory impairment, impaired reasoning, impaired planning and problem-solving. This review found that patients' cognitive deficits are common in victims of moderate to severe TBI often as the long-lasting sequalae. The present review suggests that there is a need for further research to develop unique rehabilitation methods that will help to enhance brain plasticity and process of recovery after TBI.

Temporal plasticity in auditory cortex improves neural discrimination of speech sounds

BackgroundMany individuals with language learning impairments exhibit temporal processing deficits and degraded neural responses to speech sounds. Auditory training can improve both the neural and behavioral deficits, though significant deficits remain. Recent evidence suggests that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) paired with rehabilitative therapies enhances both cortical plasticity and recovery of normal function. Objective/HypothesisWe predicted that pairing VNS with rapid tone trains would enhance the primary auditory cortex (A1) response to unpaired novel speech sounds. MethodsVNS was paired with tone trains 300 times per day for 20 days in adult rats. Responses to isolated speech sounds, compressed speech sounds, word sequences, and compressed word sequences were recorded in A1 following the completion of VNS-tone train pairing. ResultsPairing VNS with rapid tone trains resulted in stronger, faster, and more discriminable A1 responses to speech sounds presented at conversational rates. ConclusionThis study extends previous findings by documenting that VNS paired with rapid tone trains altered the neural response to novel unpaired speech sounds. Future studies are necessary to determine whether pairing VNS with appropriate auditory stimuli could potentially be used to improve both neural responses to speech sounds and speech perception in individuals with receptive language disorders.

Incorporation of feedback during beat synchronization is an index of neural maturation and reading skills

Speech communication involves integration and coordination of sensory perception and motor production, requiring precise temporal coupling. Beat synchronization, the coordination of movement with a pacing sound, can be used as an index of this sensorimotor timing. We assessed adolescents’ synchronization and capacity to correct asynchronies when given online visual feedback. Variability of synchronization while receiving feedback predicted phonological memory and reading sub-skills, as well as maturation of cortical auditory processing; less variable synchronization during the presence of feedback tracked with maturation of cortical processing of sound onsets and resting gamma activity. We suggest the ability to incorporate feedback during synchronization is an index of intentional, multimodal timing-based integration in the maturing adolescent brain. Precision of temporal coding across modalities is important for speech processing and literacy skills that rely on dynamic interactions with sound. Synchronization employing feedback may prove useful as a remedial strategy for individuals who struggle with timing-based language learning impairments.

Language learning impairment in sequential bilingual children

We review and synthesize empirical evidence at the intersection of two populations: children with language learning impairment (LLI) and children from immigrant families who learn a single language from birth and a second language beginning in early childhood. LLI is a high incidence disorder that, in recent years, has been referred to by researchers and clinical educators as specific language impairment (SLI), primary language impairment (PLI), developmental language disorder or language disorder not otherwise specified. Over the past two decades, significant international attention has been directed at the LLI-sequential bilingual learner interface. Researchers have developed linguistic profiles of children with LLI who are learning different language pairs, investigated the diagnostic accuracy of various measures and, more recently, examined the relative efficacy of different treatment protocols. Participants in these studies range in age from 3 to 12 years. A main goal of this review is to relate available evidence to key theoretical and pedagogical issues. An additional aim is to indicate main areas of need for future research.

Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Brain Imaging Investigation of Phonological Awareness and Passage Comprehension Abilities in Adult Recipients of Cochlear Implants.

The aim of this study was to examine how the brains of individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) respond to spoken language tasks that underlie successful language acquisition and processing. During functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging, CI recipients with hearing impairment (n = 10, mean age: 52.7 ± 17.3 years) and controls with normal hearing (n = 10, mean age: 50.6 ± 17.2 years) completed auditory tasks-phonological awareness and passage comprehension-commonly used to investigate neurodevelopmental disorders of language and literacy. The 2 groups had similar reaction time and performance on experimental tasks, although participants with CIs had lower accuracy than controls. Overall, both CI recipients and controls exhibited similar patterns of brain activation during the tasks. The results demonstrate that CI recipients show an overall neurotypical pattern of activation during auditory language tasks on which individuals with neurodevelopmental language learning impairments (e.g., dyslexia) tend to show atypical brain activation. These findings suggest that advancements in functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging with CI recipients may help shed new light on how varying types of difficulties in language processing affect brain organization for language.

Auditory discrimination predicts linguistic outcome in Italian infants with and without familial risk for language learning impairment

Infants’ ability to discriminate between auditory stimuli presented in rapid succession and differing in fundamental frequency (Rapid Auditory Processing [RAP] abilities) has been shown to be anomalous in infants at familial risk for Language Learning Impairment (LLI) and to predict later language outcomes. This study represents the first attempt to investigate RAP in Italian infants at risk for LLI (FH+), examining two critical acoustic features: frequency and duration, both embedded in a rapidly-presented acoustic environment. RAP skills of 24 FH+ and 32 control (FH−) Italian 6-month-old infants were characterized via EEG/ERP using a multi-feature oddball paradigm. Outcome measures of expressive vocabulary were collected at 20 months.Group differences favoring FH− infants were identified: in FH+ infants, the latency of the N2* peak was delayed and the mean amplitude of the positive mismatch response was reduced, primarily for frequency discrimination and within the right hemisphere. Moreover, both EEG measures were correlated with language scores at 20 months.Results indicate that RAP abilities are atypical in Italian infants with a first-degree relative affected by LLI and that this impacts later linguistic skills. These findings provide a compelling cross-linguistic comparison with previous research on American infants, supporting the biological unity hypothesis of LLI.

Visual Speech Perception in Children With Language Learning Impairments.

The purpose of the study was to assess the ability of children with developmental language learning impairments (LLIs) to use visual speech cues from the talking face. In this cross-sectional study, 41 typically developing children (mean age: 8 years 0 months, range: 4 years 5 months to 11 years 10 months) and 27 children with diagnosed LLI (mean age: 8 years 10 months, range: 5 years 2 months to 11 years 6 months) completed a silent speechreading task and a speech-in-noise task with and without visual support from the talking face. The speech-in-noise task involved the identification of a target word in a carrier sentence with a single competing speaker as a masker. Children in the LLI group showed a deficit in speechreading when compared with their typically developing peers. Beyond the single-word level, this deficit became more apparent in older children. On the speech-in-noise task, a substantial benefit of visual cues was found regardless of age or group membership, although the LLI group showed an overall developmental delay in speech perception. Although children with LLI were less accurate than their peers on the speechreading and speech-in noise-tasks, both groups were able to make equivalent use of visual cues to boost performance accuracy when listening in noise.

Electrocortical Dynamics in Children with a Language-Learning Impairment Before and After Audiovisual Training.

Detecting and discriminating subtle and rapid sound changes in the speech environment is a fundamental prerequisite of language processing, and deficits in this ability have frequently been observed in individuals with language-learning impairments (LLI). One approach to studying associations between dysfunctional auditory dynamics and LLI, is to implement a training protocol tapping into this potential while quantifying pre- and post-intervention status. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are highly sensitive to the brain correlates of these dynamic changes and are therefore ideally suited for examining hypotheses regarding dysfunctional auditory processes. In this study, ERP measurements to rapid tone sequences (standard and deviant tone pairs) along with behavioral language testing were performed in 6- to 9-year-old LLI children (n = 21) before and after audiovisual training. A non-treatment group of children with typical language development (n = 12) was also assessed twice at a comparable time interval. The results indicated that the LLI group exhibited considerable gains on standardized measures of language. In terms of ERPs, we found evidence of changes in the LLI group specifically at the level of the P2 component, later than 250 ms after the onset of the second stimulus in the deviant tone pair. These changes suggested enhanced discrimination of deviant from standard tone sequences in widespread cortices, in LLI children after training.

Neuroscience illuminating the influence of auditory or phonological intervention on language-related deficits.

Remediation programs for language-related learning deficits are urgently needed to enable equal opportunities in education. To meet this need, different training and intervention programs have been developed. Here we review, from an educational perspective, studies that have explored the neural basis of behavioral changes induced by auditory or phonological training in dyslexia, specific language impairment (SLI), and language-learning impairment (LLI). Training has been shown to induce plastic changes in deficient neural networks. In dyslexia, these include, most consistently, increased or normalized activation of previously hypoactive inferior frontal and occipito-temporal areas. In SLI and LLI, studies have shown the strengthening of previously weak auditory brain responses as a result of training. The combination of behavioral and brain measures of remedial gains has potential to increase the understanding of the causes of language-related deficits, which may help to target remedial interventions more accurately to the core problem.

Ten questions about terminology for children with unexplained language problems.

BackgroundIn domains other than language, there is fairly consistent diagnostic terminology to refer to children's developmental difficulties. For instance, the terms ‘dyslexia’, ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ and ‘autistic spectrum disorder’ are used for difficulties with reading, attention or social cognition, respectively. There is no agreed label, however, for children with unexplained language problems.AimsTo consider whether we need labels for unexplained language problems in children, and if so, what terminology is appropriate.Main ContributionThere are both advantages and disadvantages to labels, but they are important to ensure children receive services, and to increase our knowledge of the nature and causes of such problems. A survey of labels in current use found 132 different terms, 33 of which had 600 or more returns on Google Scholar between 1994 and 2013. Many of these labels were too general to be useful. Of the remainder, the term ‘specific language impairment’ was the most commonly used.ConclusionsThe current mayhem in diagnostic labels is unsustainable; it causes confusion and impedes research progress and access to appropriate services. We need to achieve consensus on diagnostic criteria and terminology. The DSM-5 term ‘language disorder’ is problematic because it identifies too wide a range of conditions on an internet search. One solution is to retain specific language impairment, with the understanding that ‘specific’ means idiopathic (i.e., of unknown origin) rather than implying there are no other problems beyond language. Other options are the terms ‘primary language impairment’, ‘developmental language disorder’ or ‘language learning impairment’.

Dyslexia: A language learning impairment

Dyslexia: A language learning impairment

Auditory Processing Performance and Nonsensory Factors in Children with Specific Language Impairment or Auditory Processing Disorder

The nature of auditory processing deficits is at the heart of understanding auditory processing disorder (APD) in children. This article reviews evidence that confounding nonsensory factors, including maturation, processing efficiency, and cognition, influence auditory processing in children with APD or language learning impairment. Experimental evidence is presented to show that performance thresholds on nonspeech auditory processing (AP) tests, such as tone detection tasks in noise or in quiet, are poorer in children clinically diagnosed with APD or specific language impairment (SLI), compared to typically developing mainstream school (MS) children. However, with the exception of backward masking, these group differences disappeared for all AP tests after accounting for nonverbal IQ. Intrinsic attention, indexed by variability in AP test performance, was examined alongside AP threshold performance. Generally there was no difference in intrinsic attention across the three participant groups (MS, SLI, APD), but frequency discrimination (FD) was an exception. Thus, although reduced intrinsic attention has been shown to be a factor in the presenting symptoms of APD, including poor listening, speech intelligibility, and communication, there is, surprisingly, no robust evidence that intrinsic attention in children identified with APD or SLI is any poorer than that in typically developing children.

Editorial: Are you speaking my language? Raising awareness of language learning impairments in developmental psychopathology

Language impairments affect 3–7% of the population (Norbury & Paul, 2013), yet receive very little public attention, research interest or research funding (Bishop, 2010). This is quite surprising given that language is central to our everyday lives; we use language to learn and to work, to communicate with our friends and loved ones and to access leisure activities such as reading and television. Additionally, language is a fantastic resource for problem solving, negotiating and managing our thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

Early gamma oscillations during rapid auditory processing in children with a language-learning impairment: Changes in neural mass activity after training

Children with language-learning impairment (LLI) have consistently shown difficulty with tasks requiring precise, rapid auditory processing. Remediation based on neural plasticity assumes that the temporal precision of neural coding can be improved by intensive training protocols. Here, we examined the extent to which early oscillatory responses in auditory cortex change after audio-visual training, using combined source modeling and time-frequency analysis of the human electroencephalogram (EEG). Twenty-one elementary school students diagnosed with LLI underwent the intervention for an average of 32 days. Pre- and post-training assessments included standardized language/literacy tests and EEG recordings in response to fast-rate tone doublets. Twelve children with typical language development were also tested twice, with no intervention given. Behaviorally, improvements on measures of language were observed in the LLI group following completion of training. During the first EEG assessment, we found reduced amplitude and phase-locking of early (45–75ms) oscillations in the gamma-band range (29–52Hz), specifically in the LLI group, for the second stimulus of the tone doublet. Amplitude reduction for the second tone was no longer evident for the LLI children post-intervention, although these children still exhibited attenuated phase-locking. Our findings suggest that specific aspects of inefficient sensory cortical processing in LLI are ameliorated after training.

Predicting risk for oral and written language learning difficulties in students educated in a second language

ABSTRACTThe extent to which risk for French as a second language (L2) reading and language learning impairment are distinct and can be predicted using first language (L1) predictors was examined in English-speaking students in total French immersion programs. A total of 86 children were tested in fall of kindergarten, spring kindergarten, and spring Grade 1 using an extensive battery of L1 predictor tests (in kindergarten) and L2 outcome tests (in Grade 1). Analyses of the kindergarten predictor scores revealed distinct underlying components, one related to reading and one to oral language. Further analyses revealed that phonological awareness, phonological access, and letter-sound knowledge in L1 were significant predictors of risk for reading difficulties in L2 while performance on L1 sentence repetition, phonological awareness, and tense marking tests in kindergarten were the best predictors of risk for L1 and L2 oral language difficulties. Both fall- and spring-kindergarten predictors predicted Grade 1 outcomes to a significant extent, with the spring-kindergarten predictors being more accurate. These results provide support for distinctive risk profiles for L2 oral language and reading difficulty and, furthermore, argue that assessment of L1 abilities can be used to make reasonably accurate predictions of later reading and/or oral language learning difficulties in L2 students.

RALLI: An internet campaign for raising awareness of language learning impairments

We describe the background and rationale of an internet campaign to raise awareness of language learning impairments (RALLI).