Derivational morphology in children with grammatical-specific language impairment

Supporting adjective learning by children with Developmental Language Disorder: Enhancing metalinguistic approaches

BACKGROUND

Adjectives are essential for communication, conceptual development and academic success. However, they are semantically and syntactically complex and can be particularly challenging for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Surprisingly, language interventions have not typically focused on this important word class.

AIMS

(1) To provide a supportive and accessible primer on adjectives for practitioners; (2) to explore how the SHAPE CODING^TM system can be adapted to support adjective learning in DLD; and (3) to provide practical recommendations on how to support adjective learning in clinical practice and education.

METHODS/PROCEDURE

We synthesise linguistic and psychological research on adjective semantics, clinical insights into DLD and pedagogical practice supporting this population.

MAIN CONTRIBUTION

We address the lack of specific training in the nature and acquisition of adjectives for speech and language therapists (SLTs) by providing an accessible primer. We also provide an innovative guide detailing how an established metalinguistic intervention might be adapted to support adjective learning.

CONCLUSIONS/IMPLICATIONS

Without targeted support for adjective learning, the communicative potential of children with DLD is compromised. Our recommendations can be used across a range of therapeutic and educational contexts to guide SLTs and teaching staff in developing practice in this area.

WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS

What is already known on the subject Adjectives are an essential word class needed for effective communication. They are also vital to successfully achieve academic objectives across all curriculum areas. For example, most subjects require children to be able to describe, evaluate, compare and discriminate different events, objects or techniques. Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have deficits in various domains of language that can affect adjective learning and use. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Despite the importance of adjectives, speech and language therapists (SLTs) and other professionals supporting language development rarely receive specific training regarding their structure and meanings, and how to teach and support their use. This article provides an accessible primer on the many subtypes of adjectives and how these behave syntactically and semantically. It explores how adjective teaching could be enhanced for children with DLD by adapting an established metalinguistic technique and provides practical recommendations for implementing this approach. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? By raising awareness of the complexities of adjectives and providing strategies to support their acquisition by children with DLD, this article will enable SLTs and teaching staff to improve their understanding and practice in this area and, with further research, to develop robust, effective interventions for children with DLD. This will contribute to enhancing the long-term academic, social and employment success of children with DLD.

The Importance of Speech-Language Pathologists' Explicit Knowledge of Morphology

Purpose Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work with students with specific language impairment and specific learning disorder who are known to have deficits in morphological knowledge and morphological awareness. Thus, it is important that SLPs have explicit knowledge of morphology to classify, elicit, and correct morphological errors to improve these students' morphological knowledge and morphological awareness. The purposes of this clinical focus article are to summarize current evidence about SLPs and other educators' explicit knowledge of language, to identify information that supports explicit knowledge of morphology, and to illustrate the use of explicit knowledge of morphology with a hypothetical case study. Method A case-based demonstration of an SLP's use of his/her explicit knowledge of morphology to analyze a fourth-grade student's production of derivational morphemes in a spoken language sample and on a sentence completion task is presented. Results and Conclusion The SLP's morphological analyses and summarization of the analyses are presented.

Toward Understanding the Lexical-Morphological Networks of Children With Specific Language Impairment: Analysis of Responses on a Morphological Production Task

Purpose The purpose of this study was to characterize the lexical-morphological networks of children with specific language impairment (SLI) compared to children with typical language by analyzing responses on a morphological derived form production task. Method School-age children with SLI (n = 32) and peers with typical language (n = 40) completed an oral cloze derived form production task (Carlisle, 2000). On this task, children were expected to complete verbally presented sentences with a derived form of a provided morphological stem. Responses were coded as correct or incorrect following Carlisle's (2000) stated correct responses. Incorrect responses were coded as scorable or unscorable, and then scorable responses were coded as pseudowords or real words. Real words were further coded according to whether they were repetitions of the given stem. Results There was a statistically significant between-group difference for mean correct responses (d = 1.43). The scorable incorrect responses of children with SLI included a lower mean proportion of pseudowords than did the incorrect responses of children with typical language (d = 0.76). Conclusion Because children with SLI produced a lower proportion of pseudowords as scorable incorrect responses than peers with typical language, we conclude that they have less developed lexical-morphological networks and, thus, less derivational morphology knowledge than peers with typical language.

Linguistic Contributions to Word-Level Spelling Accuracy in Elementary School Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

Purpose Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are more likely than children with typical language (TL) to exhibit difficulties in word-level spelling accuracy. More research is needed to elucidate the contribution of linguistic knowledge to word-level spelling accuracy in this population. The purpose of this study was to explore the contributions of linguistic knowledge to spelling accuracy in a group of 2nd- to 4th-grade children with SLI and a group of 2nd- to 4th-grade children with TL. Method Participants were 32 children with SLI and 32 children with TL in Grades 2 through 4. Five areas of linguistic knowledge were assessed: phonological awareness, morphological knowledge, orthographic pattern knowledge, mental grapheme representation knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge. Mixed-effects logistic regression models were utilized to address the research aim. Results Mental grapheme representation knowledge was selected as a significant predictor in both models; however, phonological awareness was the only additional significant predictor in the model for children with SLI, whereas morphological knowledge was the only other significant predictor in the model for children with TL. Orthographic pattern knowledge and vocabulary knowledge were not significant for either group. Conclusions The results suggest that spelling instruction and intervention for children with SLI should take linguistic knowledge into account and explicitly relate linguistic knowledge to spelling. Additionally, future research should consider if instructional targets for children with SLI should differ from targets for children with TL and if these findings represent a delay or a disorder in spelling acquisition for children with SLI.

Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

PURPOSE

The purpose of the present study was to examine the utility of a novel morpheme learning task for indexing typical language abilities in children characterized by diverse language backgrounds.

METHOD

Three groups of 5- to 6-year-old children were tested: monolingual speakers of English, native speakers of Spanish who also spoke English (Spanish-L1 bilinguals), and native speakers of English who also spoke Spanish (English-L1 bilinguals). All children were taught a new derivational morpheme /ku/ marking part-whole distinction in conjunction with English nouns. Retention was measured via a receptive task, and sensitivity and reaction time (RT) data were collected.

RESULTS

All three groups of children learned the novel morpheme successfully and were able to generalize its use to untaught nouns. Furthermore, language characteristics (degree of exposure and levels of performance on standardized measures) did not contribute to bilingual children's learning outcomes.

CONCLUSION

Together, the findings indicate that this particular version of the novel morpheme learning task may be resistant to influences associated with language background and suggest potential usefulness of the task to clinical practice.

The representation of roots in the spelling of children with specific language impairment

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have demonstrated general spelling and writing difficulties. We investigated the sensitivity of children with SLI to the consistent spelling of root morphemes, a feature to which young typically developing children demonstrate sensitivity. We asked children with SLI and two groups of typically developing children (n = 17 in each group) to spell the same letter-sound sequence (e.g., win) as a root, and as a component of inflected, derived, and control words (e.g., win, wins, winner, wink). Children with SLI and spelling-age-matched children (mean age of 9 and 7 years, respectively) were more accurate and more consistent in spelling the initial sections of the inflected and derived words than of the control words, a pattern that suggests sensitivity to the representation of roots in spelling. The absence of a group-level interaction suggests comparable sensitivity in the two groups. Our results suggest that elementary-school-aged children with SLI are sensitive to the consistent spelling of roots, at least to the extent predicted by their general spelling abilities.

Word production errors in children with developmental language impairments

This review focuses on the errors that children with developmental language impairments make on three types of word production tasks: lexical retrieval, the elicitation of derivationally complex forms and the repetition of non-sense forms. The studies discussed in this review come principally from children with specific language impairment, and from children who are English-speakers or deaf users of British sign language. It is argued that models of word production need to be able to account for the data presented here, and need to have explanatory power across both modalities (i.e. speech and sign).

The acquisition of prosodic constraints on derivational morphology in typically developing children and children with SLI

Aim of this study was to investigate at what age German children master prosodic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of the word formation paradigm -heit/-keit, which is comparable to English -ness, and whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties identifying the prosodic cues from the input. Derived words with -heit contain simple bases with final stress and those with -keit have complex bases with a weak final syllable. Three groups of typically developing children (four, six and eight years old) and 18 children with SLI (from 8 to 10 years) had to produce either -heit or -keit derivations in a sentence completion task. The results show that typically developing children mastered these derivations by the age of six only when both prosodic and morphological cues were present, while eight-year-old children performed almost adult-like. In contrast, most children with SLI did not produce systematic responses that follow prosodic and/or morphological constraints. The findings support the assumption that children with SLI are less sensitive to prosodic properties of grammatical forms than typically developing peers.

Caregivers' suffix frequencies and suffix acquisition by language impaired, late talking, and typically developing children

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ; 9) conversations from the CHILDES database. Maternal suffix frequency correlates with previously reported rank orders of acquisition and with child suffix frequency. Percentages of children using a suffix are consistent with frequencies in caregiver speech. Although late talkers acquire suffixes later than typically developing children, order of acquisition is similar across populations. Furthermore, the third person singular and past tense verb suffixes, weaknesses for children with language impairment, are less frequent in caregiver speech than the plural noun suffix, a relative strength in language impairment. Similar findings hold across typical, SLI and late talker populations, suggesting that frequency plays a role in suffix acquisition.

Interpretation of compound nouns by adolescents with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders: an investigation of phenotypic overlap

The study aimed to investigate (i) whether adolescents with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism plus Language Impairment (ALI) experience word-formation difficulties, and (ii) whether these two groups present with a similar language phenotype. The study investigated four groups using a 2 (language status) ×2 (autism status) design; adolescents with SLI (n = 14), ALI (n = 16), Autism Language-Typical (ALT; n = 14), and language matched controls (n = 17), with all groups presenting with typical non-verbal skills. Mean age was 14;10. Comprehension of conventional Noun-Noun lexical compounds (e.g., snowman), synthetic compounds (SCs, e.g., cat chaser), and novel root compounds (RCs, e.g., sheep socks), was assessed using a forced-choice picture selection task. The SLI and ALI participants frequently mis-parsed the SCs, interpreting the first noun as the agent. Those with poorer vocabularies and non-word repetition had greater difficulties. Reaction time (RT) profiles were flatter in the ASD groups, with similar RTs across different compounds. Language difficulties in the SLI and ALI groups extend to word-formation processes; for example, comprehension of SCs. This may reflect difficulties making analogies with stored lexical items. Overall the results support the hypothesis of a phenotypic overlap between SLI and ALI.

Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Research on specific language impairment (SLI) has primarily focused on the acquisition of nouns and verbs. Less attention has been given to other content-word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs. This article investigates adjective production by 7- to 10-year-old Russian-speaking children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers and focuses on the production of antonymous adjectives and degree markers in an elicitation experiment. The results show that degree morphology is more impaired in SLI than antonymy. In antonym production, children with SLI were able to catch up with their TD peers by age 8. In the domain of degree, however, the SLI group lagged behind the TD controls across all ages studied. Error analysis indicates that language-impaired children have particular difficulty with agreement inflection and affixal negations. They also substitute adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms. The implications of this study for the morphological-richness hypothesis are discussed.

An investigation to validate the grammar and phonology screening (GAPS) test to identify children with specific language impairment

BACKGROUND

The extraordinarily high incidence of grammatical language impairments in developmental disorders suggests that this uniquely human cognitive function is "fragile". Yet our understanding of the neurobiology of grammatical impairments is limited. Furthermore, there is no "gold-standard" to identify grammatical impairments and routine screening is not undertaken. An accurate screening test to identify grammatical abilities would serve the research, health and education communities, further our understanding of developmental disorders, and identify children who need remediation, many of whom are currently un-diagnosed. A potential realistic screening tool that could be widely administered is the Grammar and Phonology Screening (GAPS) test--a 10 minute test that can be administered by professionals and non-professionals alike. Here we provide a further step in evaluating the validity and accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of the GAPS test in identifying children who have Specific Language Impairment (SLI).

METHODS AND FINDINGS

We tested three groups of children; two groups aged 3;6-6:6, a typically developing (n = 30) group, and a group diagnosed with SLI: (n = 11) (Young (Y)-SLI), and a further group aged 6;9-8;11 with SLI (Older (O)-SLI) (n = 10) who were above the test age norms. We employed a battery of language assessments including the GAPS test to assess the children's language abilities. For Y-SLI children, analyses revealed a sensitivity and specificity at the 5(th) and 10(th) percentile of 1.00 and 0.98, respectively, and for O-SLI children at the 10(th) and 15(th) percentile .83 and .90, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings reveal that the GAPS is highly accurate in identifying impaired vs. non-impaired children up to 6;8 years, and has moderate-to-high accuracy up to 9 years. The results indicate that GAPS is a realistic tool for the early identification of grammatical abilities and impairment in young children. A larger investigation is warranted in children with SLI and other developmental disorders.

Passive participle marking by African American English-speaking children reared in poverty

PURPOSE

In this study, the authors examined the linguistic profile of African American English (AAE)-speaking children reared in poverty by focusing on their marking of passive participles and by comparing the results with the authors' previous study of homophonous forms of past tense (S. Pruitt & J. Oetting, 2009).

METHOD

The data were from 45 five- to six-year-olds who spoke AAE and who participated in the authors' earlier study. Fifteen were classified as low-income (LSES); the others were classified as middle-income and served as either age- or language-matched controls. The data came from a probe that was designed by S. M. Redmond (2003), but it was modified to examine the morphological and phonological characteristics of AAE.

RESULTS

Participle marking by all 3 groups was influenced by AAE phonology, but the LSES children marked the participles at lower rates than the controls. The LSES children's rates of participle marking were also lower than their rates of marking for homophonous forms of past tense. Unlike the children's rates of past-tense marking, their rates of participle marking were correlated to their vocabulary test scores.

CONCLUSIONS

AAE-speaking children reared in poverty present weaknesses in aspects of grammatical morphology that are related to their vocabulary weaknesses.

Assessing component language deficits in the early detection of reading difficulty risk

This article focuses on some of the linguistic components that underlie letter-sound decoding skills and reading comprehension: specifically phonology, morphology, and syntax. Many children who have reading difficulties had language deficits that were detectable before they began reading. Early identification of language difficulties will therefore help identify children at risk of reading failure. Using a developmental psycholinguistic framework, the authors provide a model of how syntax, morphology, and phonology break down in children with language impairments. The article reports on a screening test of these language abilities for preschool or young school-aged children that identifies those at risk for literacy problems and in need of further assessment.

Comprehension and production of noun compounds by Estonian children with specific language impairment

The authors examined how 12 Estonian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 60 children with normal speech development (ND) comprehended compound nouns with differing sequence of the components (first task) and how they produced compound nouns to label genuine and accidental categories by using analogy (second task) and sentence transformation (third task). The results demonstrated that children with SLI were capable of producing compound nouns for genuine categories, but avoided production of compounds to label objects in temporary juxtapositions. However, by comparison with the control group, SLI children differed statistically significantly in terms of both the number of correct answers and the pattern of mistakes. In the cases when compound nouns were expected to be produced by transforming sentences, the results of SLI children were considerably lower than those of their peers. The results of this study support the idea that children with SLI experience difficulties related to processing linguistic information.