Marker Of Specific Language Impairment Research Articles

Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment: A study of the CP-domain in German SLI

AbstractThis study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish–German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, ‘vulnerability of the CP-domain’ is not.

Use of the 2D:4D digit ratio as a biological marker of specific language disorders

IntroductionThe finding of biological markers of specific language impairment would facilitate their detection and early intervention. In this sense, the 2D:4D finger ratio is considered an indirect indicator of prenatal exposure to testosterone. Previous studies have related it to linguistic competence and aggressive behaviour, and could be a candidate for a biological marker of language impairment. The aim was to compare the value of the 2D:4D ratio in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) with those of children with typical language development, as well as to establish to what extent this biological index correlates with the behaviour (linguistic, cognitive, social,...) in both groups. Subjects and methods2D:4D ratio, language, cognition and social behaviour were compared in a group of children with SLI (n=15), with a group of children without language difficulties (n=16) of the same age (between 5 and 8 years), gender (male), and socio-cultural level. ResultsChildren with SLI showed significantly higher values of 2D:4D ratio of the right hand, and a negative correlation between this ratio and their linguistic competence. Although the children with SLI showed impaired adaptive abilities, but not more aggressive behaviour, these measurements did not correlate with the 2D:4D index. Nevertheless, social behaviour correlated with language and cognition competence. ConclusionsA higher value of the biological 2D:4D ration (lower intrauterine exposure to testosterone) seems to be associated with language difficulties in boys with SLI, but not with their behavioural difficulties. Their behavioural difficulties seem to be a consequence of their linguistic difficulties and their level of cognition.

Nonword repetition depends on the frequency of sublexical representations at different grain sizes: Evidence from a multi-factorial analysis

The nonword repetition task (NWR) has been widely used in basic cognitive and clinical research, as well as in clinical assessment, and has been proposed as a clinical marker for Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Yet the mechanisms underlying performance on this task are not clear. This study offers insights into these mechanisms through a comprehensive examination of item-related variables identified in previous research as possibly contributing to NWR scores and through testing the predictive power of each in relation to the others. A unique feature of the study is that all factors are considered simultaneously. Fifty-seven typically developing children were tested with a NWR task containing 150 nonwords differing in length, phonotactic probability, lexical neighbourhood and phonological complexity. The results indicate that phonological processing of novel words draws on sublexical representations at all grain sizes and that these representations are phonological, unstructured and insensitive to morphemehood. We propose a novel index – mean ngram frequency of all phonemes – that best captures the extent to which a nonword draws on sublexical representations. The study demonstrates the primacy of sublexical representations in NWR performance with implications for the nature of the deficit in SLI.

Marcadores del trastorno específico del lenguaje en español: comparación entre la repetición de oraciones y la repetición de pseudopalabras

ObjectiveThis study compares two markers of Specific Language Impairment in Spanish children aged 5 to 7. The markers examined are sentence repetition and pseudoword repetition, which are the two main tasks outlined in the research to identify this disorder. Both contemplate memory deficits as the source of this disorder. We review the ways in which these tasks have been used in marking Specific Language Impairment. ParticipantsThese tasks have been applied to three groups of children, aged 5 to 7 years; one consisting of children with Specific Language Impairment, another of children with Speech Sound Disorder and another of children who are typically developing. ResultsThe results of the discriminant analysis and ROC curve show that sentence repetition exhibits higher sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing children with Specific Language Impairment from children who are typically developing, but only show modest sensibility in differentiating children who are typically developing from children with Speech Sound Disorder. Neither of the two tasks can distinguish with acceptable accuracy children with Specific Language Impairment from children with Speech Sound Disorder. Discussion and conclusionsWe explain the reasons of different marking power to identify children with Specific Language Impairment, Speech Sound Disorder and typical development.

Grammar Clinical Marker Yields Substantial Heritability for Language Impairments in 16-Year-Old Twins.

There is a need for well-defined language phenotypes suitable for adolescents in twin studies and other large-scale research projects. Rice, Hoffman, and Wexler (2009) have developed a grammatical judgment measure as a clinical marker of language impairment, which has an extended developmental range to adolescence. We conducted the first twin analysis, along with associated phenotypic analyses of validity, of an abridged, 20-item version of this grammatical judgment measure (GJ-20), based on telephone administration using prerecorded stimuli to 405 pairs of 16-year-olds (148 monozygotic and 257 dizygotic) drawn from the Twins Early Development Study (Haworth, Davis, & Plomin, 2012). The distribution of scores is markedly skewed negatively, as expected for a potential clinical marker. Low performance on GJ-20 is associated with lower maternal education, reported learning disability (age 7 years), and low scores on language tests administered via the Twins Early Development Study (age 16 years) as well as General Certificate of Secondary Education English and Math examination performance (age 16 years). Liability threshold estimates for the genetic influence on low performance on GJ-20 are substantial, ranging from 36% with a lowest 10% criterion to 74% for a lowest 5% criterion. The heritability of GJ-20 scores, especially at more extreme cutoffs, along with the score distribution and association with other indicators of language impairments, provides additional evidence for the potential value of this measure as a clinical marker of specific language impairment.

The Potential of Past Tense Marking in Oral Reading as a Clinical Marker of Specific Language Impairment in School-Age Children.

The purpose of this study was twofold. The first aim was to explore differences in profiles of past tense marking in oral reading of school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI). The second aim was to explore the potential of past tense marking in oral reading as a clinical marker of SLI in school-age children. This study examined oral readings of connected text to describe the frequency and type of reading errors on regular and irregular past tense verbs for 21 children with SLI as compared to 30 children with typical language in Grades 2 and 3. Each past tense verb token was categorized into 1 of 6 mutually exclusive response types: (a) correctly marked past tense, (b) overmarked past tense, (c) bare stem, (d) other verb inflection, (e) nonverb, or (f) no response. Performance across groups was compared. Additionally, classification statistics were calculated at several cutoffs for regular past tense accuracy and regular past tense finiteness marking. For regular past tense, there was a significant group difference on accuracy. Children with SLI were less accurate at marking past tense when in oral reading than typical language peers; other response types did not differ. For irregular past tense, there were no group differences. In addition, there was a significant group difference on finiteness marking; this difference was driven by regular but not irregular verbs. A cutoff of 90% for regular past tense accuracy yielded moderate sensitivity and specificity; no cutoff for regular past tense finiteness marking yielded sensitivity above 70%. Regular past tense accuracy in oral reading provides promise as a clinical marker for diagnosing SLI in school-age children.

A Sentence Repetition Task for Catalan-Speaking Typically-Developing Children and Children with Specific Language Impairment.

It is common to find that so-called minority languages enjoy fewer (if any) diagnostic tools than the so-called majority languages. This has repercussions for the detection and proper assessment of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) brought up in these languages. With a view to remedy this situation for Catalan, I developed a sentence repetition task to assess grammatical maturity in school-age children; in current practice, Catalan-speaking children are assessed with tests translated from Spanish, with disregard of the fact that the markers of SLI may differ substantially from one language to another, even between closely related languages. The test proposed here is inspired by SASIT [School-Age Sentence Imitation Test – English], designed for English by Marinis et al. (2011); some of the constructions targeted are challenging in a subset of languages, but not others, and are included because they are indeed affected in Catalan SLI; other constructions appear to be disrupted universally. The test involves canonical SVO sentences, sentences with third person accusative clitics (known to be problematic in Catalan SLI, but not in Spanish), passives, wh- interrogatives, subordinate clauses, subject and object relatives and conditionals. The test was administered to thirty typically developing 6- and 7-year-olds (as reported in Gavarró et al., 2012b), and five children diagnosed with SLI (mean age 10;7). The results of the task were scored under two systems: (i) identical vs. non-identical repetition and (ii) identical, grammatical and ungrammatical repetition, with detail regarding the error type. The results for typically developing and SLI children showed differences between the groups: identical repetition was found in 88.9% of cases for typically developing children but only 48% for SLI children. Ungrammatical productions were higher for the SLI group, and so were grammatical but different repetitions, a trend which was found in every child individually. The results are compared to those available in the literature for similar languages and I discuss the impact of grammatical variation in language performance, in both typical and impaired development.

Sentence Recall by Children With SLI Across Two Nonmainstream Dialects of English.

The inability to accurately recall sentences has proven to be a clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI); this task yields moderate-to-high levels of sensitivity and specificity. However, it is not yet known if these results hold for speakers of dialects whose nonmainstream grammatical productions overlap with those that are produced at high rates by children with SLI. Using matched groups of 70 African American English speakers and 36 Southern White English speakers and dialect-strategic scoring, we examined children's sentence recall abilities as a function of their dialect and clinical status (SLI vs. typically developing [TD]). For both dialects, the SLI group earned lower sentence recall scores than the TD group with sensitivity and specificity values ranging from .80 to .94, depending on the analysis. Children with SLI, as compared with TD controls, manifested lower levels of verbatim recall, more ungrammatical recalls when the recall was not exact, and higher levels of error on targeted functional categories, especially those marking tense. When matched groups are examined and dialect-strategic scoring is used, sentence recall yields moderate-to-high levels of diagnostic accuracy to identify SLI within speakers of nonmainstream dialects of English.

The Non-word Repetition Task as a clinical marker of Specific Language Impairment in Spanish-speaking children

Forty native Spanish-speaking children (age 8;0–10;3), 20 with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 with Typical Language Development (TLD), received a battery of psycholinguistic tests, IQ, hearing screenings, and the Spanish Non-word Repetition Task (NRT). The children’s repetition of 20 non-words was scored. The percentage of correct non-words was significantly lower in children with SLI than in age-matched children with TLD. A length effect was found, with the subset of three-, four-, and five-syllable non-words leading to greater differences between groups. The NRT identified SLI accurately; likelihood ratios are reported with significant good sensitivity and specificity. Significant positive correlations were found, for all children together, between the overall NRT accuracy and the eight contemporary expressive/receptive language scores: PPVT-III, TTFC-2, and CEG tests; WISC-IV/Vocabulary subtest; and four ITPA subtests, including lexical fluency and comprehension of sentences/stories. The Spanish NRT can be used as a diagnostic marker for SLI. The clinical implications of phonological working memory links to psycholinguistic abilities are discussed.

Narrative production in monolingual and bilingual children with specific language impairment

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to identify potential clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children with SLI by using the Greek version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Twenty-one Greek-speaking monolingual and 15 bilingual children with SLI participated, along with monolingual (N = 21) and bilingual (N = 15) age-matched children with typical development. Results showed differences between typically development children and children with SLI in microstructure, while bilingual children with SLI were found to attain similar levels of performance, and even to outperform monolingual children with SLI, in macrostructure. It is suggested that the retelling coding scheme could permit differential diagnosis of SLI among bilingual children within the scope of narrative assessment.

Sentence repetition: what does the task measure?

Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children's sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. (1) To evaluate the effects of different types of long-term linguistic knowledge on immediate recall, (2) to assess age sensitivity of repetition tasks designed to evaluate these effects, and (3) to establish if the effects are similar across typologically different languages. The study also considers the implications of the findings for the use of sentence repetition as a research and clinical assessment tool. Participants were 50 English-speaking and 50 Czech-speaking typically developing 4-5-year-olds. Children's ability to recall sequences of items was compared in seven linguistic conditions ranging from fully well-formed sentences to sequences of non-words. In each condition, children repeated blocks of successively longer stimuli to establish their span. Results showed significant but differential effects of all linguistic factors in both languages. While syntactic violations and presence of non-words dramatically reduced children's span, semantic implausibility and the removal of sentence prosody played a significant but much smaller role. Familiarity of function words was more important than familiarity of content words. The effects of different linguistic factors on spans were the same for both languages and did not change between 4 and 5 years, although average spans increased over this age range. Children's ability to repeat sentences is more dependent on their familiarity with morphosyntax and lexical phonology than semantics or prosody, with function words of particular importance. Findings have implications for the use of recall in clinical assessment and as a research tool.

Sentence imitation as a marker of SLI in Czech: disproportionate impairment of verbs and clitics.

The authors examined sentence imitation as a potential clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in Czech and its use to identify grammatical markers of SLI. Children with SLI and the age- and language-matched control groups (total N = 57) were presented with a sentence imitation task, a receptive vocabulary task, and digit span and nonword repetition tasks. Sentence imitations were scored for accuracy and error types. A separate count of inaccuracies for individual part-of-speech categories was performed. Children with SLI had substantially more inaccurate imitations than the control groups. The differences in the memory measures could not account for the differences between children with SLI and the control groups in imitation accuracy, even though they accounted for the differences between the language-matched and age-matched control groups. The proportion of grammatical errors was larger in children with SLI than in the control groups. The categories that were most affected in imitations of children with SLI were verbs and clitics. Sentence imitation is a sensitive marker of SLI. Verbs and clitics are the most vulnerable categories in Czech SLI. The pattern of errors suggests that impaired syntactic representations are the most likely source of difficulties in children with SLI.

Linguistic markers of specific language impairment in bilingual children: The case of verb morphology

This study investigates verbal morphology in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on past participle inflection. Longitudinal data from 12 German-speaking children with SLI, six monolingual and six Turkish–German sequential bilingual children, were examined, plus an additional group of six typically developing Turkish–German sequential bilingual children. In a recent study (Rothweiler, M., Chilla, S., & H. Clahsen. (2012). Subject verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 39–57), the same children with SLI were found to be severely impaired in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. By contrast, the new results reported in this study show that both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI produce participle inflection according to their language age. Our results strengthen the case of difficulties with agreement as a linguistic marker of SLI in German and show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early sequential bilingual child’s performance in one of her two languages.

Nonword repetition--a clinical marker for specific language impairment in Swedish associated with parents' language-related problems.

First, we explore the performance of nonword repetition (NWR) in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing children (TD) in order to investigate the accuracy of NWR as a clinical marker for SLI in Swedish-speaking school-age children. Second, we examine the relationship between NWR, family aggregation, and parental level of education in children with SLI. A sample of 61 children with SLI, and 86 children with TD, aged 8–12 years, were administered an NWR test. Family aggregation, measured as the prevalence of language and/or literacy problems (LLP) in parents of the children with SLI, was based on family history interviews. The sensitivity and specificity of nonword repetition was analyzed in a binary logistic regression, cut-off values were established with ROC curves, and positive and negative likelihood ratios reported. Results from the present study show that NWR distinguishes well between Swedish-speaking school-children with and without SLI. We found 90.2% sensitivity and 97.7% specificity at a cut-off level of −2 standard deviations for binary scoring of nonwords. Differences between the SLI and TD groups showed large effect sizes for the two scoring measures binary (d = 2.11) and percent correct consonants (PCC) (d = 1.79). The children with SLI were split into two subgroups: those with no parents affected with LLP (n = 12), and those with one or both parents affected (n = 49). The subgroup consisting of affected parents had a significantly lower score on NWR binary (p = .037), and there was a great difference between the subgroups (d = 0.7). When compared to the TD group, the difference from the subgroup with affected parents was almost one standard deviation larger (d = 2.47) than the difference from the TD to the subgroup consisting of non-affected parents (d = 1.57). Our study calls for further exploration of the complex interaction between family aggregation, language input, and phenotypes of SLI.

Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children

We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.

Markers for persistent specific expressive language delay in 3–4‐year‐olds

AbstractBackgroundIdentifying 3–4‐year‐olds who are most at risk of persisting language difficulties, and possibly specific language impairment (SLI), is difficult due to the natural variation of language in young children. In older children, markers for SLI have been identified that differentiate between children with and without SLI. It is not known whether these markers can be used at an earlier age to identify children most at risk of persisting language difficulties.AimsTo identify possible risk markers of current status that distinguish children who have specific expressive language delay (SELD) from the variation observed in normally developing children at age 3;0–4;0 and 4;0–5;0. To determine the most suitable measure(s) that would predict which children with SELD at age 3;0–4;0 were likely to have persistent expressive language delay (PELD) at age 4;0–5;0.Methods & ProceduresForty‐seven children with SELD and 47 children with typical language development (TLD) were assessed on language, nonverbal IQ and marker tasks at age 3;0–4;0 (baseline). Ninety‐one children were reassessed on the measures one year later (follow‐up). At both time points, the marker tasks were compared with a reference standard (Expressive Communication subscale (EC) of the Preschool Language Scale—3 (PLS‐3) (UK)) to determine the most useful marker for identifying children with SELD. Possible predictors were examined to determine the most suitable measure(s) that would predict which children with SELD at baseline were likely to have PELD at follow‐up.Outcome & ResultsA modified version of Recalling Sentences, a subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF)—Preschool UK, was the most useful marker for identifying children with SELD at baseline and at follow‐up. Thirty‐five (76.1%) of the 46 children with SELD at baseline had PELD at follow‐up. Performance on the Auditory Comprehension (AC) and EC subscales of the PLS‐3 (UK) and on modified Recalling Sentences at age 3;0–4;0 were predictors of PELD at age 4;0–5;0.Conclusions & implicationsA modified Recalling Sentences task was a good risk marker for SELD at age 3;0–4;0 and SELD at age 4;0–5;0. PLS‐3 AC, PLS‐3 EC and modified Recalling Sentences at baseline were the best predictors of PELD. The use of modified Recalling Sentences as a predictive marker requires confirmation.

Clinical markers in Italian‐speaking children with and without specific language impairment: a study of non‐word and real word repetition as predictors of grammatical ability

In many languages a weakness in non-word repetition serves as a useful clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in children. However, recent work in Italian has shown that the repetition of real words may also have clinical utility. For young typically developing Italian children, real word repetition is more predictive of particular grammatical abilities than is non-word repetition. This finding is important because these particular grammatical abilities--the production of present-tense third-person plural inflections and direct-object clitic pronouns--are precisely those that are problematic for Italian-speaking children with SLI. Along with their grammatical requirements, these two morpheme types present a significant phonological/prosodic challenge for these children. To replicate the findings with young typically developing Italian children and to determine whether real word repetition is also more predictive of the use of these two morpheme types than is non-word repetition in a group of Italian-speaking children with SLI. Seventeen Italian-speaking children with SLI and 17 younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance participated in tasks of real word and non-word repetition as well as tasks requiring the production of direct-object clitic pronouns and present-tense third-person plural inflections. Children with SLI were less accurate than their younger peers on all measures. Importantly, for the younger typically developing children, real word repetition explained a significant amount of variance in the use of third-person plural inflections and direct-object clitic pronouns. For the children with SLI, in contrast, non-word repetition was a significant predictor, whereas real word repetition was not a contributing factor. It is argued that in Italian SLI, the grammatical details showing the greatest weakness present phonological/prosodic obstacles as well as grammatical challenges to these children. Consequently, non-word repetition emerges as a predictor of these grammatical weaknesses in SLI, unlike the profile observed in typically developing Italian children.

The Effects of Production Demands on Grammatical Weaknesses in Specific Language Impairment: The Case of Clitic Pronouns in Italian

Extended optional use of direct object clitic pronouns (e.g., la in Paula la vede ["Paula sees her"]) appears to be a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in Italian. In this study, we examined whether sentence production demands might influence the degree to which Italian-speaking children with SLI produced clitics. Preschool-age children with SLI ( n = 15) and 2 groups of younger typically developing children ( n = 15 each) participated. Production demands were varied through use of a syntactic priming task. The children with SLI were more likely than the comparison children to omit the clitic in a control condition in which they had to describe a target picture without the benefit of a preceding sentence prime. The children with SLI were also more likely to describe target pictures using a default clitic or a clitic that had appeared in the preceding prime sentence but was inappropriate for the target. The findings suggest that children with SLI have difficulty generating a sentence containing a grammatical slot for a clitic when production demands are increased, and when they succeed in generating such a sentence, they often cannot at the same time retrieve the appropriate clitic form.

Memory and language in middle childhood in individuals with a history of specific language impairment.

This study reports on the sensitivity of sentence repetition as a marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in different subgroups of children in middle childhood and examines the role of memory and grammatical knowledge in the performance of children with and without language difficulties on this task. Eleven year old children, 197 with a history of SLI and 75 typically developing (TD) peers were administered sentence repetition, phonological short term memory (PSTM) and grammatical morphology tasks. Children with a history of SLI were divided into four subgroups: specific language impairment, non-specific language impairment, low cognition with resolved language and resolved. Performance on the sentence repetition task was significantly impaired in all four subgroups of children with a history of SLI when compared to their age peers. Regression analyses revealed grammatical knowledge was predictive of performance for TD children and children with a history of SLI. However, memory abilities were significantly predictive of sentence repetition task performance for children with a history of SLI only. Processes involved in sentence repetition are more taxing of PSTM for individuals with a history of SLI in middle childhood in a way that does not appear to be the case for TD children.

Assessing bilingual Chinese–English young children in Malaysia using language sample measures

One reason why specific language impairment (SLI) is grossly under-identified in Malaysia is the absence of locally- developed norm-referenced language assessment tools for its multilingual and multicultural population. Spontaneous language samples provide quantitative information for language assessment, and useful descriptive information on child language development in complex language and cultural environments. This research consisted of two studies and investigated the use of measures obtained from English conversational samples among bilingual Chinese–English Malaysian preschoolers. The research found that the language sample measures were sensitive to developmental changes in this population and could identify SLI. The first study examined the relationship between age and mean length of utterance (MLUw), lexical diversity (D), and the index of productive syntax (IPSyn) among 52 typically-developing (TD) children aged between 3;4–6;9. Analyses showed a significant linear relationship between age and D (r = .450), the IPsyn (r = .441), and MLUw (r = .318). The second study compared the same measures obtained from 10 children with SLI, aged between 3;8–5;11, and their age-matched controls. The children with SLI had significantly shorter MLUw and lower IPSyn scores than the TD children. These findings suggest that utterance length and syntax production can be potential clinical markers of SLI in Chinese–English Malaysian children.