Past Tense Production in Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment Across Germanic Languages: A Meta-Analysis

Comprehension of verb morphology in Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with a range of morphosyntactic skills, particularly with tense and subject - verb agreement. Many studies have examined verb-morphology production in children with DLD. We extend this line of research by profiling verb-morphology comprehension in 67 monolingual Saudi Arabic-speaking children, comprising 33 with DLD (M = 61 months, SD = 10.70), and 34 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (M = 63 months, SD = 8.94). Children completed a novel picture selection task developed to assess their comprehension of verb tense, gender agreement, and number agreement. Children with DLD scored significantly lower than TD children on the verb morphology comprehension task. They showed greater difficulty identifying verb tense forms, particularly future tense. They also demonstrated lower accuracy in identifying subject-verb agreement in general, with specific difficulty in comprehending masculine verbs, and singular verbs. These findings were compared with production verb-morphology data from previous Arabic studies. Overall, this study highlights the challenges experienced by Arabic-speaking children with DLD in comprehending verb morphology, particularly tense and subject-verb agreement inflections. These findings can be used to tailor appropriate assessment designs and interventions for an Arabic-speaking DLD population.

Neural Correlates of Telicity in Spanish-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

BACKGROUND

It is broadly acknowledged that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show verb-related limitations. While most previous studies have focused on tense, the mastery of lexical aspect-particularly telicity-has not been the primary focus of much research. Lexical aspect refers to whether an action has a defined endpoint (telic verbs) or not (atelic verbs).

OBJECTIVE

This study investigates the effect of telicity on verb recognition in Chilean children with DLD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique.

METHOD

The research design is a mixed factorial design with between-group factors of 2 (DLD/TD) and within-group factors of 2 (telic/atelic verbs) and 2 (coherent/incoherent sentences). The participants were 36 school-aged children (18 DLD, 18 TD) aged 7 to 7 years and 11 months. The task required subjects to listen to sentences that either matched or did not match an action in a video, with sentences including telic or atelic verbs.

RESULTS

The study found notable differences between groups in how they processed verbs (N400 and post-N400 components) and direct objects (N400 and P600 components).

CONCLUSIONS

Children with DLD struggled to differentiate telic and atelic verbs, potentially because they employed overgeneralization strategies consistent with the Event Structural Bootstrapping model.

A systematic review of factors that impact reading comprehension in children with developmental language disorders

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a high rate of co-occurring reading difficulties. The current study aims to (i) examine which factors within the Active View of Reading (AVR; Duke & Cartwright, 2021) apply to individuals with DLD and (ii) investigate other possible factors that relate to reading comprehension ability in individuals with DLD, outside the components in the AVR. Electronic database search and journal hand-search yielded 5058 studies published before March 2022 related to reading comprehension in children with DLD. 4802 articles were excluded during abstract screening, yielding 256 studies eligible for full-text review. Following full-text review, 44 studies were included and further coded for demographics, language of assessment, description of reported disabilities, behavioral assessment, and reading comprehension assessment. While the results aligned with the AVR model, three additional factors were identified as significantly relating to reading comprehension abilities in children with DLD: expressive language (oral and written), question types of reading assessment, and language disorder history. Specifically, expressive language was positively associated with reading comprehension ability, while resolved DLD showed higher reading comprehension abilities than persistent DLD. Furthermore, children with DLD may face additional difficulties in comprehending inference-based questions. This study provides factors for researchers, educators, and clinical professionals to consider when evaluating the reading comprehension of individuals with DLD. Future research should further explore the relative importance of factors of the AVR to reading comprehension outcomes throughout development.

Characterising the Long-Term Language Impairments of Children Following Cerebellar Tumour Surgery by Extracting Psycholinguistic Properties from Spontaneous Language

Following cerebellar tumour surgery, children may suffer impairments of spontaneous language. Yet, the language processing deficits underlying these impairments are poorly understood. This study is the first to try to identify these deficits for four levels of language processing in cerebellar tumour survivors. The spontaneous language of twelve patients who underwent cerebellar tumour surgery (age range 3-24 years) was compared against his or her controls using individual case statistics. A distinction was made between patients who experienced postoperative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS) and those who did not. Time since surgery ranged between 11 months and 12;3 years. In order to identify the impaired language processing levels at each processing level (i.e., lexical, semantic, phonological and/or morphosyntactic) nouns and verbs produced in the spontaneous language samples were rated for psycholinguistic variables (e.g., concreteness). Standard spontaneous language measures (e.g., type-token ratio) were calculated as well. First, inter-individual heterogeneity was observed in the spontaneous language outcomes in both groups. Nine out of twelve patients showed language processing deficits three of whom were diagnosed with pCMS. Results implied impairments across all levels of language processing. In the pCMS-group, the impairments observed were predominantly morphosyntactic and semantic, but the variability in nature of the spontaneous language impairments was larger in the non-pCMS-group. Patients treated with cerebellar tumour surgery may show long-term spontaneous language impairments irrespective of a previous pCMS diagnosis. Individualised and comprehensive postoperative language assessments seem necessary, given the inter-individual heterogeneity in the language outcomes.

Psycholinguistic profiling of children with sluggish cognitive tempo

Language disorders are frequently comorbid with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT), a second attention disorder, may potentially explain some of the links between language disorders and ADHD. In this study we examined the psycholinguistic abilities of 207 children (mean age 7;10) with and without clinically significant levels of SCT symptoms to determine the degree to which symptoms of language disorder co-occur in cases of SCT. Analyses of children's tense-marking, nonword repetition, and sentence recall indicated that deficits in these areas were not associated with SCT. Instead, SCT appears to be more closely aligned with features of social (pragmatic) communication disorder.

The competition-compensation account of developmental language disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection in novel contexts leads the inflection to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved through a compensatory behavior that involves producing a more accessible alternative: in English, the bare form. We formalize this hypothesis within a probabilistic model that trades off context-dependent versus independent processing. Results show an over-reliance on preceding stem contexts when retrieving the inflection in a model that has difficulty with processing novel inflected forms. We further show that following the introduction of a bias to store and retrieve forms with preceding contexts, generalization in the typically developing (TD) models remains more or less stable, while the same bias in the DLD models exaggerates difficulties with generalization. Together, the results suggest that inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes by children with DLD could stem from inferences they make on the basis of data containing fewer novel inflected forms. Our account extends these findings to suggest that problems with detecting a form in novel contexts combined with a bias to rely on familiar contexts when retrieving a form could explain sequential planning difficulties in children with DLD. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Generalization difficulties with inflectional morphemes in children with Developmental Language Disorder arise from these children's limited experience with novel inflected forms. Limited experience with a form in novel contexts could lead to a storage bias where retrieving a form often requires relying on familiar preceding stems. While generalization in typically developing models remains stable across a range of model parameters, certain parameter values in the impaired models exaggerate difficulties with generalization. Children with DLD compensate for these retrieval difficulties through accessibility-driven language production: they produce the most accessible form among the alternatives.

The study of children with developmental language disorder beyond English: a tutorial

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general. Benefits to children and local societies are also likely to accrue. After presenting some of the initial considerations involved in the cross-linguistic study of children with language disorders, we provide examples of the types of questions that might be asked. The examples are informed by our own collaborative work studying children DLD across the languages of Cantonese, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish, as well as English. Examples from investigators' work on other languages are also included. We discuss within-language comparisons of children with DLD and their same-age and younger typically developing peers as well as between-language comparisons of children with DLD. Examples concern issues of morphophonology, prosody, syntactic movement, verb paradigm complexity, and underlying mechanisms, among others. These examples-tied as they are to current theories and hypotheses-are necessarily limited to the types of languages already receiving investigative attention. Through the participation of child language scholars from a wider set of disciplines we can expand the number and types of languages studied and, as a consequence, greatly enhance our understanding of childhood language disorders.

Use of Aspect Markers by Mandarin-speaking Children with High-Functioning Autism Plus Language Impairment and Children with Developmental Language Disorder

INTRODUCTION

This study investigates the comprehension and production of four typical Mandarin aspect markers zai-, -le, -zhe, and -guo by preschool children with high functioning autism plus language impairment (HFA-LI) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD), by comparing them with typically developing age-matched (TDA) children.

METHODS

Twenty children with HFA-LI (M/F: 18/2; mean age: 5.20), 20 with DLD (M/F: 11/9; mean age: 5.25), and 20 TDA children (M/F:14/6; mean age:5.27) completed a picture-choice task and priming picture-description task. The results were analyzed using non-parametric methods.

RESULTS

In the comprehension task, the HFA-LI and DLD groups achieved lower accuracy than the TDA group on zai-, -le, and -guo. The comprehension of aspect markers in the HFA-LI and DLD groups was affected by lexical aspect. In the production task, the HFA-LI and DLD groups produced fewer sentences with the target aspect marker for all four aspect markers than the TDA group. However, they produced more sentences with bare verb forms for zai- and -guo than the TDA group. Furthermore, all three groups tended to combine aspect markers with their semantically inherent types of verbs (e.g, zai-+Activity verbs). The HFA-LI group produced more sentences irrelevant to the task than the other two groups for -zhe and -guo, and some children in the HFA-LI group produced ungrammatical sentences in which both the progressive zai- and perfective -le were used.

CONCLUSIONS

Children with HFA-LI and DLD demonstrate similarities in the comprehension and production of Mandarin aspect markers, given their poor comprehension of the aspect markers zai-, -le and -guo, and poor production of all four aspect markers compared to their TDA peers. Their performance was also impacted by lexical aspect.

Comprehension of Mandarin Aspect Markers by Preschool Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markers zai- and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective -zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective -le and imperfective zai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs.

Expressive Verb Morphology Deficits in Arabic-Speaking Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose This study investigated the production of tense and subject-verb agreement in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to their typically developing (TD) peers in terms of (a) performance accuracy and (b) error patterns. Method Participants were 14 children with DLD aged 4;0-7;10 and 32 TD children aged 3;0-8;0 matched on nonverbal abilities. Children were asked to complete a picture-based verb elicitation task. The task was designed to measure the production accuracy of tense and subject-verb agreement inflections in Arabic. Results The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on the verb elicitation task. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than the TD group in marking tense, specifically present tense. They were also less accurate in marking agreement in general, with specific difficulty in using feminine verb forms. The DLD and TD groups differed in their tense error patterns, but not in agreement error patterns. Conclusions The acquisition of verb morphology in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD appears to be delayed and possibly different from their TD peers. The DLD group found the production of marked verb forms more challenging than less marked ones. These results are discussed in light of the structural characteristics of Arabic. Future studies would need to include larger sample sizes; investigate other aspects of verb morphology, including both production and comprehension; include other language domains; and consider longitudinal designs to provide more in-depth knowledge of Arabic language acquisition.

Marking of Tense and Agreement in Language Samples by Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Evaluation of Scoring Approaches and Cut Scores Across Structures

Purpose As follow-up to a previous study of probes, we evaluated the marking of tense and agreement (T/A) in language samples by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) while also examining the clinical utility of different scoring approaches and cut scores across structures. Method The samples came from 70 AAE- and 36 SWE-speaking kindergartners, evenly divided between the SLI and typically developing groups. The structures were past tense, verbal -s, auxiliary BE present, and auxiliary BE past. The scoring approaches were unmodified, modified, and strategic; these approaches varied in the scoring of forms classified as nonmainstream and other. The cut scores were dialect-universal and dialect-specific. Results Although low numbers of some forms limited the analyses, the results generally supported those previously found for the probes. The children produced a large and diverse inventory of mainstream and nonmainstream T/A forms within the samples; strategic scoring led to the greatest differences between the clinical groups while reducing effects of the children's dialects; and dialect-specific cut scores resulted in better clinical classification accuracies, with measures of past tense leading to the highest levels of classification accuracy. Conclusions For children with SLI, the findings contribute to studies that call for a paradigm shift in how children's T/A deficits are assessed and treated across dialects. A comparison of findings from the samples and probes indicates that probes may be the better task for identifying T/A deficits in children with SLI in AAE and SWE. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13564709.

Tense Marking in the Kindergarten Population: Testing the Bimodal Distribution Hypothesis

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore whether evidence for a bimodal distribution of tense marking, previously documented in clinically referred samples, exists in a population-based sample of kindergarten children from a rural county in Tennessee. Method A measure of tense marking, the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI) Screening Test, was individually administered to consented kindergarten students (N = 153) across three elementary schools in a single school district. The consented children constituted 73% of kindergartners in the district. Cluster analysis was used to evaluate the number and composition of latent classes that best fit the distribution of the TEGI Screening Test scores. Results Analysis of the scores revealed a distribution that deviated significantly from normality. Cluster analyses (Ward's, k-means, single linkage) revealed a two-cluster solution as the best fitting model. The very large effect-size difference in mean TEGI Screening Test score between the two clusters (d = 4.77) provides validation of an identifiable boundary delineating typical from atypical tense marking in this sample of kindergartners. The difference in tense marking across the two clusters was not attributable to child chronological age. The percentage of the sample comprising the low-performing cluster aligns with specific language impairment and developmental language disorder prevalence estimates. Conclusion Additional demonstrations of a bimodal distribution of tense marking in future studies with carefully defined samples could strengthen the clinical marker evidence and utility of this linguistic feature.

Do Children With Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) Have Difficulties With Interference Control, Visuospatial Working Memory, and Selective Attention? Developmental Patterns and the Role of Severity and Persistence of DLD

Purpose Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have weaknesses in executive functioning (EF), specifically in tasks testing interference control and working memory. It is unknown how EF develops in children with DLD, if EF abilities are related to DLD severity and persistence, and if EF weaknesses expand to selective attention. This study aimed to address these gaps. Method Data from 78 children with DLD and 39 typically developing (TD) children were collected at three times with 1-year intervals. At Time 1, the children were 5 or 6 years old. Flanker, Dot Matrix, and Sky Search tasks tested interference control, visuospatial working memory, and selective attention, respectively. DLD severity was based on children's language ability. DLD persistence was based on stability of the DLD diagnosis. Results Performance on all tasks improved in both groups. TD children outperformed children with DLD on interference control. No differences were found for visuospatial working memory and selective attention. An interference control gap between the DLD and TD groups emerged between Time 1 and Time 2. Severity and persistence of DLD were related to interference control and working memory; the impact on working memory was stronger. Selective attention was unrelated to DLD severity and persistence. Conclusions Age and DLD severity and persistence determine whether or not children with DLD show EF weaknesses. Interference control is most clearly impaired in children with DLD who are 6 years and older. Visuospatial working memory is impaired in children with severe and persistent DLD. Selective attention is spared.

Past-tense inflection of non-verbs: a potential clinical marker of developmental language disorder in Swedish children

AIM

In this paper, we explore the performance of past-tense inflection of non-verbs (NVI) in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in typically developing controls, to investigate its accuracy as a clinical marker for Swedish-speaking children with DLD. Further, we investigate the relationship between NVI, nonword-repetition, and family history.

METHODS

The sample consists of 36 children with DLD (mean age 9;5 years) and 60 controls (mean age 9;2 years).

RESULTS

The DLD group performed significantly lower than the controls on the NVI task, with a large effect size of the difference (d = 1.52). Analysis of the clinical accuracy of NVI resulted in 80.6% sensitivity and 76.6% specificity. NVI was significantly and moderately associated with nonword-repetition in the controls, but not in the DLD group. A positive family history, 80.6% in the DLD group and 6.9% in the controls, was associated with lower performance on NVI. When controlling for group (DLD and controls), a non-significant association between family history and performance on the NVI task was found.

CONCLUSIONS

NVI is a potential clinical marker of DLD in Swedish school-aged children, but the current NVI task does not reach the level of being acceptable. Further development of the NVI task is warranted to improve its accuracy.

Deficits in Explicit Language Problem Solving Rather Than in Implicit Learning in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Learning an Artificial Morphological Rule

Purpose The purpose of this study was to delineate differences between children with specific language impairment (SLI), typical age-matched (TAM) children, and typical younger (TY) children in learning and mastering an undisclosed artificial morphological rule (AMR) through exposure and usage. Method Twenty-six participants (eight 10-year-old children with SLI, 8 TAM children, and ten 8-year-old TY children) were trained to master an AMR across multiple training sessions. The AMR required a phonological transformation of verbs depending on a semantic distinction: whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate. All participants practiced the application of the AMR to repeated and new (generalization) items, via judgment and production tasks. Results The children with SLI derived significantly less benefit from practice than their peers in learning most aspects of the AMR, even exhibiting smaller gains compared to the TY group in some aspects. Children with SLI benefited less than TAM and even TY children from training to judge and produce repeated items of the AMR. Nevertheless, despite a significant disadvantage in baseline performance, the rate at which they mastered the task-specific phonological regularities was as robust as that of their peers. On the other hand, like 8-year-olds, only half of the SLI group succeeded in uncovering the nature of the AMR and, consequently, in generalizing it to new items. Conclusions Children with SLI were able to learn language aspects that rely on implicit, procedural learning, but experienced difficulties in learning aspects that relied on the explicit uncovering of the semantic principle of the AMR. The results suggest that some of the difficulties experienced by children with SLI when learning a complex language regularity cannot be accounted for by a broad, language-related, procedural memory disability. Rather, a deficit-perhaps a developmental delay in the ability to recruit and solve language problems and establish explicit knowledge regarding a language task-can better explain their difficulties in language learning.

Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

Purpose In African American English and Southern White English, we examined whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) overtly mark tense and agreement structures at lower percentages than typically developing (TD) controls, while also examining the effects of dialect, structure, and scoring approach. Method One hundred six kindergartners completed 4 dialect-informed probes targeting 8 tense and agreement structures. The 3 scoring approaches varied in the treatment of nonmainstream English forms and responses coded as Other (i.e., those not obligating the target structure). The unmodified approach counted as correct only mainstream overt forms out of all responses, the modified approach counted as correct all mainstream and nonmainstream overt forms and zero forms out of all responses, and the strategic approach counted as correct all mainstream and nonmainstream overt forms out of all responses except those coded as Other. Results With the probes combined and separated, the unmodified and strategic scoring approaches showed lower percentages of overt marking by the SLI groups than by the TD groups; this was not always the case for the modified scoring approach. With strategic scoring and dialect-specific cut scores, classification accuracy (SLI vs. TD) was highest for the 8 individual structures considered together, the past tense probe, and the past tense probe irregular items. Dialect and structure effects and dialect differences in classification accuracy also existed. Conclusions African American English- and Southern White English-speaking kindergartners with SLI overtly mark tense and agreement at lower percentages than same dialect-speaking TD controls. Strategic scoring of dialect-informed probes targeting tense and agreement should be pursued in research and clinical practice.

Prevalence of Publication Bias Tests in Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

PURPOSE

The purpose of this research note is to systematically document the extent that researchers who publish in American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) journals search for and include unpublished literature in their meta-analyses and test for publication bias.

METHOD

This research note searched all ASHA peer-reviewed journals for published meta-analyses and reviewed all qualifying articles for characteristics related to the acknowledgment and assessment of publication bias.

RESULTS

Of meta-analyses published in ASHA journals, 75% discuss publication in some form; however, less than 50% test for publication bias. Further, only 38% (n = 11) interpreted the findings of these tests.

CONCLUSION

Findings reveal that more attention is needed to the presence and impact of publication bias. This research note concludes with 5 recommendations for addressing publication bias.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7268648.

Effectiveness of intervention with visual templates targeting tense and plural agreement in copula and auxiliary structures in school-aged children with complex needs: a pilot study

This pilot study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based intervention using visual strategies for improving accurate use of auxiliary and copula marking in singular and plural, past and present tense by students with moderate learning disability and complex needs. Eleven students, aged 10-14 years, in a specialist school based in the UK, participated in the study. A within participants design was used which included testing at baseline, pre- and post-intervention to consider progress with intervention as compared with progress during a baseline period of similar length. The experimental intervention consisted of eight, bi-weekly, 20 minute sessions, over a four week period, in small groups, in a classroom setting. Half of the participants focused on the auxiliary and half on the copula, but all were tested on both. Techniques included the use of visual templates and rules (the Shape Coding^TM system) to support explicit instruction. Eight participants made greater progress during the intervention term than during the baseline term and this was significant at a group level (d = 0.92). A comparison of progress to zero was not significant during the baseline period (d = 0.15) but was during the intervention period (d = 1.07). Progress also appeared to generalise from the targeted to non-targeted structure. This pilot study therefore provides preliminary evidence that older students with complex needs can make progress with morphology when intervention includes explicit instruction and visual templates and that generalisation may be observed.

Tense and plural formation in Welsh-English bilingual children with and without language impairment

BACKGROUND

Grammatical morphology has been shown to be problematic for children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorder (DLD). Most research on this topic comes from widely spoken languages, such as English. Despite Welsh being the most extensively spoken indigenous in the UK after English, and Wales being the only official bilingual country in the UK, our knowledge about the morphosyntactic areas of Welsh that may pose problems for Welsh-speaking children with SLI is limited. Currently, Welsh-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) are heavily reliant on the use of informally translated English assessments. This can inadvertently result in a failure to take aspects of Welsh morphosyntax into account that are critical for the assessment and treatment of Welsh-speaking children.

AIMS

This is the first study to examine how Welsh-English bilingual children of early school age with typical development (bi-TD) and with SLI (bi-SLI) perform on production tasks targeting verbal and nominal morphology in Welsh. We targeted areas of Welsh morphosyntax that could potentially be vulnerable for Welsh-speaking children with or at risk of language impairment, such as tense marking and plural formation, and assessed their diagnostic potential.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

Twenty-eight Welsh-dominant bilingual children participated in the study: 10 bi-SLI and 18 bi-TD. They were administered three elicitation tasks targeting the production of verbal (compound and synthetic past tense) and nominal (plural) morphology in Welsh.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

The bi-SLI children performed worse than their bi-TD peers across all three tasks. They produced more uninflected verbs in the elicited-production task and were less likely to be prompted to produce the synthetic past, which is a concatenating, low-frequency form of the past tense. They also over-regularized less in the context of plural nouns, and when they did, they opted for high-frequency suffixes.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

By focusing on aspects of morphosyntactic development which are unique to Welsh, we have increased existing about how verbal and nominal morphology are acquired in Welsh-speaking bi-SLI and bi-TD children. The present results point towards productivity problems for Welsh-speaking bi-SLI children who are adversely influenced by low-frequency structures and fail to over-regularize in the context of verbal and nominal concatenating morphology. From a clinical perspective, targeting synthetic past-tense forms through a prompting task may be a promising assessment and intervention tool that future studies could explore further.

A Multiyear Population-Based Study of Kindergarten Language Screening Failure Rates Using the Rice Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to evaluate, over 2 separate school years, the school-district-wide failure rate of kindergartners on a screener of grammatical tense marking-the Rice Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI) Screening Test (Rice & Wexler, 2001)-composed of past tense (PT) and third-person singular (3S) probes.

Method

In the fall of 2 consecutive school years, consented and eligible kindergartners (n = 148 in Year 1, n = 126 in Year 2) in a rural southern school district were administered the TEGI Screening Test. Children who failed the screening test or either of the individual probes (PT or 3S) were administered the Primary Test of Nonverbal Intelligence. All children also completed the Test of Articulation Performance-Screen (Bryant & Bryant, 1983) and, in Year 2, the Get Ready to Read! emergent literacy screener (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001).

Results

The screening tool outcome most closely and consistently aligned with the recommended failure rate of approximately 30% (Oetting, Gregory, & Rivière, 2016; based on Tomblin et al., 1997) was the TEGI PT probe. TEGI Screening Test and 3S probe failure rates fell below the recommended level. Most children who failed the PT probe demonstrated nonverbal intelligence skills within the average range. In addition, most children who failed the PT probe would not have been readily identified on the basis of only the results of their articulation or emergent literacy screenings.

Conclusions

The TEGI PT probe is an efficient and reliable screener that identifies children for monitoring or additional language assessment. Children with language vulnerabilities are not necessarily identified by articulation or emergent literacy screenings at entry to kindergarten. To identify children at risk for language impairment, it is therefore necessary to directly screen oral language.

Home and Community Language Proficiency in Spanish-English Early Bilingual University Students

PURPOSE

This study assessed home and community language proficiency in Spanish-English bilingual university students to investigate whether the vocabulary gap reported in studies of bilingual children persists into adulthood.

METHOD

Sixty-five early bilinguals (mean age = 21 years) were assessed in English and Spanish vocabulary and verbal reasoning ability using subtests of the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey-Revised (Schrank & Woodcock, 2009). Their English scores were compared to 74 monolinguals matched in age and level of education. Participants also completed a background questionnaire.

RESULTS

Bilinguals scored below the monolingual control group on both subtests, and the difference was larger for vocabulary compared to verbal reasoning. However, bilinguals were close to the population mean for verbal reasoning. Spanish scores were on average lower than English scores, but participants differed widely in their degree of balance. Participants with an earlier age of acquisition of English and more current exposure to English tended to be more dominant in English.

CONCLUSIONS

Vocabulary tests in the home or community language may underestimate bilingual university students' true verbal ability and should be interpreted with caution in high-stakes situations. Verbal reasoning ability may be more indicative of a bilingual's verbal ability.

Language Proficiency and Sustained Attention in Monolingual and Bilingual Children with and without Language Impairment

Background: The language profiles of children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children can show partial, and possibly temporary, overlap. The current study examined the persistence of this overlap over time. Furthermore, we aimed to better understand why the language profiles of these two groups show resemblance, testing the hypothesis that the language difficulties of children with LI reflect a weakened ability to maintain attention to the stream of linguistic information. Consequent incomplete processing of language input may lead to delays that are similar to those originating from reductions in input frequency. Methods: Monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI (N = 128), aged 5-8 years old, participated in this study. Dutch receptive vocabulary and grammatical morphology were assessed at three waves. In addition, auditory and visual sustained attention were tested at wave 1. Mediation analyses were performed to examine relationships between LI, sustained attention, and language skills. Results: Children with LI and bilingual children were outperformed by their typically developing (TD) and monolingual peers, respectively, on vocabulary and morphology at all three waves. The vocabulary difference between monolinguals and bilinguals decreased over time. In addition, children with LI had weaker auditory and visual sustained attention skills relative to TD children, while no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals emerged. Auditory sustained attention mediated the effect of LI on vocabulary and morphology in both the monolingual and bilingual groups of children. Visual sustained attention only acted as a mediator in the bilingual group. Conclusion: The findings from the present study indicate that the overlap between the language profiles of children with LI and bilingual children is particularly large for vocabulary in early (pre)school years and reduces over time. Results furthermore suggest that the overlap may be explained by the weakened ability of children with LI to sustain their attention to auditory stimuli, interfering with how well incoming language is processed.

Grammatical Morphology in Monolingual and Bilingual Children With and Without Language Impairment: The Case of Dutch Plurals and Past Participles

PURPOSE

Grammatical morphology is often a locus of difficulty for both children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children. In contrast to previous research that mainly focused on verbal tense and agreement markings, the present study investigated whether plural and past participle formation can disentangle the effects of LI and bilingualism and, in addition, can point to weaknesses of LI that hold across monolingual and bilingual contexts.

METHOD

Monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI (n = 33 per group) were tested at 2 waves with a word formation task that elicited Dutch noun plurals and past participles. The quantity and quality of errors as well as children's development over time were examined.

RESULTS

The plural formation task discriminated between monolingual children with and without LI, but a less differentiated picture emerged in the bilingual group. Moreover, plural accuracy showed fully overlapping language profiles of monolinguals with LI and bilinguals without LI, in contrast to accuracy scores on the past participle formation task. Error analyses suggested that frequent omission of participial affixes may be indicative of LI, irrespective of lingual status.

CONCLUSION

The elicited production of past participles may support a reliable diagnosis of LI in monolingual and bilingual learning contexts.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5165689.