Children with Specific Language Impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections

Kunnari, Sari; Savinainen-Makkonen, Tuula; Leonard, Laurence B.; Mäkinen, Leena; Tolonen, Anna-Kaisa; Luotonen, Mirja; Leinonen, Eeva

doi:10.1017/s0305000910000528

Cited by 34 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Studies to date suggest non-word repetition and past tense marking to be worth assessing when identifying children with SLI. Furthermore, verb morphology may also be of interest based on a number of studies in various languages [7,37] as well as auditory processing [38]. The results of this study support the use of these clinical markers when identifying SLI in primary health care, and they also provide further evidence to support their inclusion as universal characteristics of language difficulties.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Use of Language Tests when Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Primary Health Care

Hannus

Kauppila

Pitkäniemi³

et al. 2013

Folia Phoniatr Logop

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective: To evaluate the ability of language tests to identify children with specific language impairment (SLI) in primary health care. All the language tests presently in clinical use in Finland were applied. Method: All the children with SLI living in one city in Finland constituted the cohort. Test scores were collected from 83 subjects drawn from a birth cohort of 4,553 children. Finally 31 case-control pairs were studied. All SLI diagnoses were set in secondary health care. Test scores of 14 language tests were examined that, together with subtests, included 39 different tasks. Results: Out of 39 performed tests, the difference in test scores between children with SLI and their matched controls was statistically significant in 26 tests. A group of six tests had good sensitivity and moderate specificity for SLI diagnosis and they correctly classified children with SLI to either F80.1 or F80.2 diagnosis category. Conclusion: The results suggest that most of the language tests in Finnish identify children with SLI and, furthermore, that these tests identify language deficits that are consistent with those found in other studies. More studies with larger age-matched populations are needed.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Use of Language Tests when Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Primary Health Care

Hannus

Kauppila

Pitkäniemi³

et al. 2013

Folia Phoniatr Logop

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…morphological characteristics typical for isolating, fusional, agglutinative or polysynthetic languages). For example, Kunnari et al [29] reported that for Finnish children with specific language impairment, learning the tense/agreement inflection system of a language is radically affected by details within the system. Thus, indexes such as MSL and MLU should be used predominantly for comparison within a language, not between languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It may turn out that preterm children have greater deficits in morphosyntax than in vocabulary size since inflections in Finnish reflect a complex combination of grammatical functions [29] . In addition, the effect of gender on children's expressive language and associations between the language measures were examined.…”

Section: Expressive Language Skills In Preterm Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Language Skills in Finnish Two-Year-Old Extremely- and Very-Low-Birth-Weight Preterm Children

Kunnari

Yliherva

Paavola

et al. 2011

Folia Phoniatr Logop

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective: Preterm children with low birth weight are at greater risk of experiencing speech and language difficulties than full-term children. The aim of the current study was to investigate expressive language skills of Finnish-speaking preterm children with low birth weight [extremely-low-birth-weight (ELBW) children: n = 8; very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children: n = 10] at 2 years of corrected age and to compare their language results with full-term controls (n = 18), using spontaneous speech samples. Methods: The children were video recorded in semistructured free-play sessions with their mothers. From these video samples, expressive vocabulary size and maximum sentence length (MSL) were analyzed. In addition, the possible effect of children’s gender on language measures as well as associations between different language measures were examined. Results: The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the preterm and full-term groups in the size of expressive vocabulary. In contrast, the MSL, which measures morphosyntactic skills, was significantly shorter in preterm children. A positive correlation was found between MSL and expressive vocabulary. Children’s gender was not associated with language skills measured. Conclusion: The findings indicate that Finnish-speaking preterm children, especially ELBW children, experience difficulties in morphosyntactic skills.

show abstract

“…The lack of a measure of morphosyntax was a clear shortcoming of the study, as children with language impairment have often been shown to have difficulties with inflectional morphology (Kunnari et al, 2011). In addition, the use of spontaneous language samples (Asikainen, 2005;Conti-Ramsden & Durkin, 2012) and oral narratives (Marini, Tavano, & Fabbro, 2008) in evaluating children's language skills has been recommended, as it seems that standardized language tests are not systematically able to identify all children with language impairment (e.g.…”

Section: Strengths and Weaknessesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children With Differing Developmental Trajectories of Prelinguistic Communication Skills: Language and Working Memory at Age 5

Määttä

Laakso

Tolvanen

et al. 2014

J Speech Lang Hear Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose In this article, the authors examine the developmental continuity from prelinguistic communication to kindergarten age in language and working memory capacity. Method Following work outlining 6 groups of children with different trajectories of early communication development (ECD; Määttä, Laakso, Tolvanen, Ahonen, & Aro, 2012), the authors examined their later development by psychometric assessment. Ninety-one children first assessed at ages 12–21 months completed a battery of language and working memory tests at age 5;3 (years;months). Results Two of the ECD groups previously identified as being at risk for language difficulties continued to show weaker performance at follow-up. Seventy-nine percent of the children with compromised language skills at follow-up were identified on the basis of the ECD groups, but the number of false positives was high. The 2 at-risk groups also differed significantly from the typically developing groups in the measures tapping working memory capacity. Conclusions In line with the dimensional view of language impairment, the accumulation of early delays predicted the amount of later difficulties; however, at the individual level, the prediction had rather low specificity. The results imply a strong link between language and working memory and call for further studies examining the early developmental interaction between language and memory.

show abstract

Children with Specific Language Impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections

Cited by 34 publications

References 28 publications

Use of Language Tests when Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Primary Health Care

Use of Language Tests when Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Primary Health Care

Expressive Language Skills in Finnish Two-Year-Old Extremely- and Very-Low-Birth-Weight Preterm Children

Children With Differing Developmental Trajectories of Prelinguistic Communication Skills: Language and Working Memory at Age 5

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About