Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open to questions of method and interpretation. This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological-age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers. Children produced both spoken and written summaries of two educational videotapes that provided models of either narrative or expository (informational) discourse. Productivity measures, including total T-units, total words, and words per minute, were significantly lower for children with LLD than for CA children. Fluency (percent T-units with mazes) and lexical diversity (number of different words) measures were similar for all children. Grammatical complexity as measured by words per T-unit was significantly lower for LLD children. However, there was no difference among groups for clauses per T-unit. The only measure that distinguished children with LLD from both CA and LA peers was the extent of grammatical error. Effects of discourse genre and modality were consistent across groups. Compared to narratives, expository summaries were shorter, less fluent (spoken versions), more complex (words per T-unit), and more error prone. Written summaries were shorter and had more errors than spoken versions. For many LLD and LA children, expository writing was exceedingly difficult. Implications for accounts of language impairment in older children are discussed.
Research has shown that children repeat high-probability phoneme sequences more accurately than low-probability ones. This effect attenuates with age, and its decrease is predicted by developmental changes in the size of the lexicon (J. Edwards, M. E. Beckman, & B. Munson, 2004; B. Munson, 2001; B. Munson, J. Edwards, & M. Beckman, 2005). This study expands on these findings by examining relationships between vocabulary size and repetition accuracy of nonwords varying in phonotactic probability by 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 16 chronological-age-matched (CA) peers with typical speech and language development, and 16 younger children matched with the children with SLI on vocabulary size (VS). As in previous research, children with SLI repeated nonwords less accurately than did CA children. The children with SLI and the VS children showed similar levels of nonword repetition accuracy. Phonotactic probability affected repetition accuracy more for children with SLI and VS children than for CA children. Regression analyses showed that measures of vocabulary size were the best predictor of the difference in repetition accuracy between high- and low-probability sequences. Analyses by items showed that measures of phonotactic probability were stronger predictors of repetition accuracy than judgments of wordlikeness. Taken together, the results support research demonstrating that vocabulary size mediates the influence of phonotactic probability on nonword repetition, perhaps due to its influence on the ongoing refinement of phonological categories.
The difference in novel word learning performance between children with LI and age-matched children is strongly affected by task and participant characteristics in the primary studies.
Purpose
Identifying children with primary or specific language impairment (LI) in languages other than English continues to present a diagnostic challenge. This study examined the utility of English and Spanish nonword repetition (NWR) to identify children known to have LI.
Method
Participants were 4 groups of school-age children (N = 187). There were 2 typically developing groups: proficient Spanish-English sequential bilinguals and monolingual English speakers. There were 2 groups of children with LI, one Spanish-English and the other monolingual English speakers. Children participated in both English and Spanish NWR.
Results
Children’s NWR performance was significantly correlated across languages. In English NWR, the 2 groups with LI had lower accuracy at the longest syllable length than the 2 typically developing groups. In Spanish NWR, monolingual children with LI had lower repetition accuracy than bilingual children with LI and typical monolingual children, with all 3 groups outperformed by the typical bilingual group. Likelihood ratios indicated adequate diagnostic power only for English NWR in ruling out the typical bilingual children as showing LI.
Conclusion
The results demonstrate that NWR performance relies on the dual influences of LI and native language experience. However, it remains possible that NWR is useful in a composite marker for LI.
We report results from 2 language-based processing tasks designed to investigate the performance of linguistically diverse learners. The tasks were the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT) and Non-Word Repetition (NWR). Participants were 100 school-age children in 1 of 3 different experimental groups: monolingual English-speaking children with specific or primary language impairment (LI), typical English-only-speaking children (EO), or typical Spanish-English bilingual children (BI). On both CLPT and NWR, EO group performance was best and LI group performance was poorest, with BI group performance falling in between. Likelihood ratios indicated that performance on these tasks does not provide compelling diagnostic power for separating typically developing bilinguals from monolingual children with LI. One exception is that children who obtained an NWR score of 93 percent or higher could be ruled out of the LI group with a high degree of confidence.
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