Data from ten Swedish-Arabic preschool children with language impairment and ten Swedish-Arabic children with normal language development matched for age and exposure to Swedish were analyzed. Specific tasks for both Swedish and Arabic were designed. By using the hierarchy predicted by processability theory as a yardstick, grammatical development was measured in the two languages of the children. The basic assumption is that there is a developmental sequence that all language learners follow on their way toward a target language. The results show that the bilingual children with language impairment tend to have a balanced low level of language development in both languages, whereas the bilingual children with normal language development show a higher level of language development in at least one language.
The parental questionnaire FTF (Five to Fifteen) was given to parents of 76 children (mean age 11 years) diagnosed with ADHD. About half of the children had at least once been referred to a speech- and language pathologist. Most of them had not received any intervention or follow-up. A factor analysis identified six problem areas, which explain close to 75% of the total variation: Cognitive Skills, Motor/Perception, Emotion/Socialisation/Behaviour, Attention, Literacy Skills and Activity Control. The majority of the children had pragmatic problems, which are associated with some of the core aspects of the ADHD symptoms, especially inattention and impulsiveness. Communication and language comprehension caused these children many more problems than expressive language. Problems of reading and writing were very frequent. IQ-score was associated with maths and reading/writing. Additional items reflecting language skills, in particular language comprehension and pragmatics, were also found in other domains in the FTF, mainly in Executive functions, Learning and Social skills. Problems with language and pragmatics thus seem to be associated with the typical problems with learning and social skills in children with ADHD.
Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were collected and analyzed grammatically. The subjects consisted of 5 children with SLI and 5 MLU matched controls with normal grammatical development. The children with SLI differed significantly from the controls in their more restricted usage of word order patterns and in number of grammatical errors. As in studies on English-speaking children with SLI, the Swedish children with SLI had a large number of omissions of grammatical morphemes. Verb-related errors were more common than noun-related errors. Contrary to reports on children with SLI acquiring other languages, however, word order errors were also very common in the Swedish children with SLI. A restricted usage of word order patterns in combination with errors of word order indicates that not only morphological deficits but also syntactic difficulties can be found in children with SLI relative to MLU controls, depending on the target language. The findings show the importance of cross-linguistic comparisons of children with SLI.
A developmental perspective is important to understand the nature of LI in bilingual children. The results also have implications for the assessment of language development in bilingual children with severe LI, since a hardly perceptible development over time is observed.
Specific language impairment has, although not without controversy, been considered as a consequence of a phonological memory deficit. Non-word repetition has been proposed as a reliable index of phonological memory and also as predictive of lexical and grammatical development in normally developing and language-impaired children. The main aim was to study the relationship between repetition of words and non-words and expressive language skills (phonology and grammar) in 27 5-year-old children with language impairment. The authors also wanted to explore the influence of lexical stress on repetition skills. The results showed that words were significantly easier to repeat than non-words and that non-word repetition skills were significantly correlated to phonological and grammatical development. The most important predictor of non-word repetition skills was output phonology. The conclusion is that non-word repetition is not a single, reliable index of phonological memory in preschool children with language impairment. Also, the influence of prosodic variables on segmental aspects of speech production should not be overlooked in non-word construction, since it was found that unstressed syllables were omitted six times more often in prestressed than in post-stressed positions of the words and non-words.
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