Child Language

Children with developmental disabilities often converse less frequently than their developmentally matched peers. This low conversational participation can cause problems for the children’s future language and discourse development. The purpose of this experimental study was to test the hypothesis that adult topic-continuing wh-questions would elicit topic continuations in children with relatively low language ability, but not in children with relatively high language ability. Twenty-three children with developmental delays interacted with an adult who conducted two play sessions. In each session, the adult used a different interaction style. The two styles differed in the adult’s use of topic-continuing wh-questions. Results indicate that adult use of topic-continuing wh-questions supported the use of child continuations in children at all language levels. The type of continuations (single word versus multiword) that were elicited depended on the language level of the children. Cli...

There are marked disparities between pre-school children in key skills affecting school readiness, disparities that commonly persist and influence children's later academic achievements, employment, and adjustment. Much of this disparity is linked to socio-economic disadvantage and its impact on the home learning environment. Children's Centres are an ideal context in which to implement and evaluate programmes to address this problem. They principally serve the 30% worst areas on the Indices of Deprivation Affecting Children, providing for families from the antenatal period up to age 5 years, aiming to promote parenting skills and provide care for children. We are conducting a randomised controlled trial, based in Children Centres, to evaluate a parenting intervention for caregivers of children between 28 and 45 months of age. The intervention provides training to parents in dialogic book-sharing. The training is run by a facilitator who sees parents in small groups, on a we...

The recent literature on language intervention has become increasingly focused upon developing treatments that more closely parallel normal language acquisition. However, there have been relatively few reports that directly compare imitative procedures to conversational-interactive interventions. The purpose of the present study was to compare the relative effectiveness of imitative intervention and conversational recast language intervention applied to a wide range of grammatical morpheme and complex sentence targets in 21 children with specific language impairment. The results indicated that although both kinds of treatments were effective in triggering acquisition of most targets, consistently fewer presentations to first spontaneous use were required in the conversational procedure. In addition, the transition from elicited production to generalized spontaneous production was more rapid under conversationinteractive treatment. Finally, although imitation treatment was more effec...

Purpose There is a substantial minority of children for whom lexical retrieval problems impede the normal pattern of language development and use. These problems include accurately producing the correct word even when the word’s meaning is understood. Such problems are often referred to as word-finding difficulties ( WFDs ). This article examines the nature of naming and lexical retrieval difficulties in these and other groups of children. Method A review of the relevant literature on lexical access difficulties in children with word-finding difficulties was conducted. Studies were examined in the terms of population parameters and comparison groups included in the study. Results and Conclusions Most discussions of the cognitive processes causing lexical retrieval difficulties refer to semantics, phonology, and processing speed. The authors propose that understanding of these topics will be further advanced by the use of appropriate methodology to test developmental models. In this ...

This study tested the effect of a method of facilitating prelinguistic communication on parents' responsivity and children's communication and productive language development. The method involved Responsivity education for the parents and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching for the children (RPMT). Thirty-nine prelinguistic toddlers with intellectual disabilities and their primary caregivers participated in this study. Parent-child pairs were randomly assigned to either the RPMT group or a control group. Communication and language were assessed at study entry and 6, 9, and 12 months later. RPMT facilitated parental responsivity in the posttreatment period. The effect of RPMT on growth rate of child-initiated comments (i.e., the most common type of initiating joint attention) varied by pretreatment measures of that variable. The effect of RPMT on growth rate of child-initiated requests (i.e., the most common type of initiating behavior regulation) varied by presence or absence of D...

Purpose To describe a new measure of functional intelligibility, the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS), and evaluate its validity, reliability, and sensitivity using 3 clinical measures of severity of speech sound disorder: (a) percentage of phonemes correct (PPC), (b) percentage of consonants correct (PCC), and (c) percentage of vowels correct (PVC). Method Speech skills of 120 preschool children (109 with parent-/teacher-identified concern about how they talked and made speech sounds and 11 with no identified concern) were assessed with the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (Dodd, Hua, Crosbie, Holm, & Ozanne, 2002). Parents completed the 7-item ICS, which rates the degree to which children’s speech is understood by different communication partners (parents, immediate family, extended family, friends, acquaintances, teachers, and strangers) on a 5-point scale. Results Parents' ratings showed that most children were always (5) or usually (4) understood by...

Purpose: The aim of this tutorial is to support speech-language pathologists (SLPs) undertaking assessments of multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders, particularly children who speak languages that are not shared with their SLP. Method: The tutorial was written by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, which comprises 46 researchers (SLPs, linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists) who have worked in 43 countries and used 27 languages in professional practice. Seventeen panel members met for a 1-day workshop to identify key points for inclusion in the tutorial, 26 panel members contributed to writing this tutorial, and 34 members contributed to revising this tutorial online (some members contributed to more than 1 task). Results: This tutorial draws on international research evidence and professional expertise to provide a comprehensive overview of working with multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders. This over...

Purpose Speech-language pathologists know much more about children's development of fictional narratives than they do about children's development of personal narratives and the role these personal narratives play in academic success, social–emotional development, and self-regulation. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide clinicians with strategies for assessing and developing children's and adolescents' personal narratives. Method This tutorial reviews the literature on (a) the development of autobiographical event narratives and life stories, (b) factors that contribute to development of these genres, (c) the importance of these genres for the development of sense of self-identity and self-regulation, (d) deficits in personal narrative genres, and (e) strategies for eliciting and assessing event narratives and life stories. Implications To promote development of personal event narratives and life stories, speech-language pathologists can help clients retrieve ...

Purpose The validity of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) for children who speak African American English (AAE) was evaluated by conducting an item analysis and a comparison of the children’s scores as a function of their maternal education level, nonmainstream dialect density, age, and clinical status. Method The data were language samples from 62 children; 52 of the children were between the ages of 4 and 6 years and were classified as developing typically, and 10 were 6 years old with specific language impairment (SLI). Results All IPSyn items were produced by at least 1 child, and 88% of the items were produced by 50% or more of the children. The children’s IPSyn scores were unrelated to maternal education level and dialect density and were visually comparable to IPSyn scores reported for children who speak mainstream English. Nevertheless, IPSyn could not be used to detect differences between the 4- to 6-year-olds based on age, nor could it be used to de...

Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual benefits to processing disadvantages. We examined how experience with accented speech modulates mono- and bilingual children's (mean age: 9;10) ease of speech comprehension for two unfamiliar accents in German, one foreign and one regional. More experience with regional accents helped children repeat sentences correctly in the regional condition and in the standard condition. More experience with foreign accents did not help in either accent condition. The results suggest that type and amount of accent experience co-determine processing ease of accented speech.