Can connective use differentiate between children with and without specific language impairment?

Abstract

The ability of language-impaired children to maintain coherence by using discourse connectives has so far been assessed by quantitative measures. This study is a first attempt to scrutinize the quality of connective use in specific language impairment (SLI). The authors investigate whether Russian-speaking children reveal sensitivity to the subtle discourse-organizational distinctions between the quasi-synonymous connectives i ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’ in a narrative task. Study 1 compared connective use by 7-year-olds with and without SLI. The results demonstrate that connective frequencies do not differentiate between the two groups, but language-impaired children more often use connectives in a way that violates causal relations in the story. Study 2 assessed connective production by the same SLI participants 16 months later and also tested understanding of causal chains in a follow-up interview. The error rates remained high. These errors were not due to poor understanding of the story, since the language-impaired children answered the causal questions in the follow-up interview as well as their unimpaired peers did.

Connective use in the narratives of bilingual children and monolingual children with SLI

“…In their study Russian L1 German L2 children overused the Russian connective i "and" in contexts of reference shift, presumably under the influence of the German counterpart und "and" that is equally acceptable in contexts of reference maintenance and reference shift. However, the results reported by Tribushinina et al (2015) suggest that Russian monolinguals with SLI also overuse i for reference shift in cases where there is no plausible causal relation between the events (as in 2b), and they also inappropriately use a where the causal use of i would be required. These errors were not due to misunderstanding the causal links in the story, as children with a language impairment performed like unimpaired controls on the task testing the understanding of story grammar.…”

“…Despite their high frequencies in the input and early emergence in child speech (Knjazev, 2007), the acquisition of their semantic profiles is not yet completed by age 7 (Tribushinina et al, 2015). As explained above, both Russian-German early sequential bilinguals (Tribushinina et al, forthcoming) and Russian monolinguals with SLI (Tribushinina et al, 2015) were shown to have particular difficulty with the production of these discourse connectives. Tribushinina et al (forthcoming) explain the differences between bilinguals and monolinguals by appealing to crosslinguistic influence from German.…”

“…Notice, however, that crosslinguistic influence might not be the (only) factor explaining differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. For one, another study (Tribushinina, Dubinkina & Sanders, 2015) showed that monolingual Russian-speaking children with SLI also have difficulty using appropriate discourse connectives. Hence, it might be the case that the problems in connective use reported for early sequential bilinguals are not (only) due to crosslinguistic influence, but rather due to reduced input in both languages and/or due to processing cost in bilingualism.…”

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

“…Several studies have reported, for example, that children with SLI have diffi culties producing appropriate narrative discourses beyond the appropriateness of their referential choices (e.g., Norbury & Bishop, 2003). The diffi culties range r om sentence complexity, use of connectives, and use of internal state language to aspects of narrative organization and complexity (Tribushinina et al, 2015a and2015b;Tsimpli et al, 2016). In our study, we concentrate on two very narrowly defi ned pragmatic and grammatical factors, contrast and grammatical role, respectively.…”

Language intervention for causal adverbial production and science content learning

“…In addition, children with SLI are more likely than TD peers to produce grammatical errors in sentences with causal adverbials (Owen, 2010). These children may also struggle with the semantic demands of producing causal adverbial structures, such that they select conjunctions mismatched with the underlying causal relationship they are describing (Tribushinina, Dubinkina, & Sanders, 2015. Spoken language difficulties are exacerbated in written tasks, including difficulties generating complex sentences (Scott & Windsor, 2000).…”