Assessment and Treatment for Language Disorders (exam 2)

Question 1

Definition of Language Disorder

Answer 1

A language disorder is the impairment or deviant development of comprehension and/ or use of a spoken, written, and or other symbol system.

This disorder may involve 1) the form of language (phonologic, morphologic, and syntactic systems); 2) the content of language (semantic system); and/or 3) the function of language in communication (the pragmatic system) in any combination.
ASHA definition

Question 2

Role of Cognition in Language Development

Answer 2

Cognitive development involves a process by which children construct and reconstruct a representation of the entities and events around them (Witt, 1998). When develop these mental representations is when begin to produce first words.

Question 3

Piaget stage 1: Sensorimotor Stage

Answer 3

From birth to approximately age 2
The child will:
Explore the world through senses and motor activity
In the early stages can’t tell difference between themselves and the environment
Object permanence forms
Begin to understand cause and effect
Can follow something with their eyes

Question 4

Piaget stage 2: Preoperational stage

Answer 4

From approximately age 2 to 7
The child will:
Communicate better through speech
Can imagine future and reflect on the past
Develop basic numerical abilities
Still pretty egocentric, but learning to be able to delay gratification
Have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality (ex: cartoon characters are real people).
Can’t understand conservation of matter

Question 5

Piaget stage 3: Concrete Operational Stage

Answer 5

From age 7 to 11
The child will demonstrate:
They can solve conservation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations
Abstract reasoning ability begins to emerge

Question 6

Piaget stage 4: Formal Operational Stage

Answer 6

12 years +
Cognitive development culminates in the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation
Piaget believed that the attainment of the formal operations stage, in contrast to the other stages, is not universal
LIMITATIONS EXIST IN PIAGET’s THEORY!!!

Question 7

Limitations & weaknesses in Piaget’s Theory

Answer 7

Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
-Piaget’s tasks are culturally biased
-Schooling and literacy affect rates of development
Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, some weaknesses are now apparent
-The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
-Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
–Object permanence in 3-month-olds (Bower, 1974)
–Conservation of matter in 4 year olds (McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974)

Question 8

Role of Environment in Language Development

Answer 8

Caretakers use language differently with children than adults

• Shorter, less complex sentences
• Focus on concrete things
• Focus on things child is interested in
• Repetition
• Higher pitch
• Exaggerated intonation
• Increased pauses
• More questions and commands

Question 9

Cross-linguistic evidence of influence of parent lang. input

Answer 9

• English-speaking parents use more nouns
• –First words of English speakers typically nouns (Gentner, 1982; Nelson, 1973)
• Mandarin Chinese-speaking parents use more verbs
• –First words of their children are verbs (Tardif, 1995)
• Korean-speaking parents talk about activities more
• –First words of their children are nouns and verbs (Choi, 2001)

Question 10

Assessment questions for language

Answer 10

Does a child have a language disorder?
How severe is it?
What kinds of error patterns does the child demonstrate?
What aspects of language are affected?

Question 11

What are some early predictors of Lang Disorder?

Answer 11

• Some children are “late bloomers”
• At age 2, these children demonstrate normal lang comprehension but use less than 50 words and no word combinations
• B/w 50 and 75% of these children outgrow the delay by age 3
• The remaining 25 to 50% demonstrate an expressive language delay that persists

Question 12

What are some risk factors for language disorders?

Answer 12

• Pre-maturity with low birth weight
• Maternal drug and alcohol abuse
• Presence of genetic syndrome
• Prolonged hospitalization due to physical disabilities and frequent illness
• Neglect and abuse

Question 13

What are the informal/alternative types of language assessment?

Answer 13

Language sample analysis
Curriculum-based assessments
Portfolio assessment
Dynamic assessment

For informal assessment we will focus mostly on Language Sample Analysis.

Question 14

What is a language sample analysis?

Answer 14

uses spontaneous or elicited language samples to analyze different aspects of language.

Question 15

What are curriculum-based assessments?

Answer 15

directly examine the skills that are expected to be obtained via the curriculum. For curriculum-based language assessments, the goal is to use samples of the real curriculum to analyze the student’s curriculum-based language processing abilities.

Question 16

Portfolio Assessment

Answer 16

A systematic, purposeful collection of student work that provides insight into the student’s efforts, progress, or achievement in certain curriculum areas. Carefully chosen pieces of work that represent the learning process.

Question 17

Dynamic Assessment

Answer 17

Examines a child’s ability to learn. Often uses a test-teach-retest format to look at improvement with teaching. For the teaching phase information about examiner effort can be important to DA outcomes.

Question 18

What are the formal/standardized types of language assessments?

Answer 18

Traditional standardized tests
Utilize norms for comparison to peers
Strict administration guidelines

Question 19

Why take a language sample?

Answer 19

Permits insight into communicative competence

Question 20

How to obtain a representative sample? Who should be involved in the sampling activity and what kind of activities should you do?

Answer 20

The clinician should get the sample. They are often unfamiliar, need to establish rapport. Presents more of challenge, since clinician has less background info than familiar people, so need to describe, be more clear.

With younger children establish a play setting that requires dialogue. With older children ask open ended questions. Seek narratives and conversation.

Question 21

How should you analyze a language sample?

Answer 21

Form (morpho-syntax & phonology)
Content (semantics)
Use (communicative intent/pragmatic functions)

Question 22

Morphosyntactic analysis

Answer 22

Evaluate production of morphological and syntactic structures relative to developmental stage.
MLU
Grammatical elements
Sentence types
-simple, complex, declarative, interrogative, imperative

Question 23

What is morphosyntax?

Answer 23

the interface between syntax and morphology. Ex. includes tense but also aspect-whether activity has finished or not. Ex. Has gone. Was going.

Question 24

What does a semantic analysis evaluate?

Answer 24

How do children express and combine meaning through increasingly complex utterances?

Question 25

What are some measures of semantic complexity?

Answer 25

Number of different words (NDW)
Total number of words (TNW)
Type Token Ratio (TTR) = NDW/TNW

Question 26

What skills does pragmatic analysis measure?

Answer 26

Scores depend upon age expectation.

Communicative intents (describe, give information, ask/answer questions etc.)
Conversational repair
Turn-taking
Topic maintenance

Question 27

What are narratives expected to be like at age 3?

Answer 27

narrative relates to central topic with no particular temporal order

Question 28

At age 4, what should their narrative be like?

Answer 28

increased temporal organization that follows a central theme, topic

Question 29

At age 5 what should their narrative be like?

Answer 29

Their narrative should have a temporal order and central theme

Question 30

Story Grammar in school age children should include:

Answer 30

Setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, action, resolution, ending

Question 31

During this time period infant masters the cognitive, social and communicative behaviors that form the foundation of the child’s language system.

Answer 31

Birth to age 2

Question 32

What is early intervention so important?

Answer 32

Intervention provided during the first two years of life capitalizes on the rapid neural growth and learning potential of young brain

Question 33

What is the main goal of early intervention?

Answer 33

Development of basic skills critical to successful language learning

• Localization
• Joint attention
• Mutual gaze
• Joint action and routines
• Vocalizations
• Communicative Intentions
• Symbolic play
• Initial vocabulary

Question 34

Primary focus of early intervention?

Answer 34

Primary focus is family involvement and education

Question 35

How can one test an infant’s localization?

Answer 35

Clinician can make sound outside of infants visual field and wait for infant to turn head to look for sound

If infant does not turn head then you can move infant’s head toward sound

Question 36

How do infants demonstrate awareness of the sounds in their environment and what is this called?

Answer 36

Infants demonstrate awareness of sounds in their environment by turning toward and visually searching for the source of sound

Localization

Question 37

In an infant’s mind what highlights the relationship b/w the adult’s utterances and the concepts they represent?

Answer 37

Joint attention b/w an adult and an infant

Question 38

How can a clinician attempt to facilitate joint attention?

Answer 38

Place interesting or noisy object in front of infant, shake it and then gently return infant’s head to encourage eye contact with object
Follow infant’s gaze to object and then point to and label it to facilitate JA

Question 39

Why is mutual gaze important to early development?

Answer 39

Forms basis for attachment/bonding b/w infant and caregiver
Also basic building block for later development of turning taking
characteristic of early communicative development

Question 40

How can one facilitate mutual gaze?

Answer 40

Infants should be immediately reinforced for making eye contact visually, verbally and physically
Infants use of eye contact often increases by holding their attention with smiling, other facial expressions, touching and novel/entertaining vocalizations

Question 41

Where does joint action occur between an adult and an infant?

Answer 41

in play sequences referred to as sound gesture games or routines such as peekaboo, patty-cake, etc.

Question 42

Why is it important to establish a routine in order to increase the potential of having a successful adult-infant interaction?

Answer 42

Allows for anticipation of events and increases the potential for a successful adult infant interaction
-Each partner knows what to expect from each other making the order of events highly predictable
The regularity of these events is thought to allow the infant to begin to understand the linguistic code and acquiring first words.
Also helps facilitate future understanding of turn taking

Question 43

What is communicative intent? At what age should children discover it?

Answer 43

Meaning a speaker wants to convey
At about 9 mos of age infants discover intentional communication and begin to express their communicative intentions through gesture and vocalization

Question 44

What are some examples of pre-verbal communicative intent?

Answer 44

Attention seeking (e.g., tug on mom’s shirt got attention, point to object to draw attention to it)
Requesting (e.g., point to animal that they want, hand book to have adult read it, point to usual location of cookie jar and look at parent to find out where it is)
Greetings (e.g., waves “hi” or “bye”)
Transfer (e.g., gives over the toy he is playing with)
Protesting/rejecting (e.g., cries when toy is taken away, pushes away food)
Responding/acknowledging (e.g., responds appropriately to simple directions, smiles when parent initiates favorite game
Informing (e.g., points to wheel on truck to indicate that it is broken)

Question 45

What are some examples of early verbal communicative intent?

Answer 45

Communicative intentions expressed at the single word level
Naming (e.g. common nouns to label people, objects, events)
Commenting (e.g., words that describe physical attributes; observable movements and actions; and words that refer to attributes that are not immediately observable such as possession)
Requesting (e.g., object, action, info)
Responding (e.g., words that directly correspond to preceding utterance)
Protesting/rejecting (e.g., words that express objection to ongoing or impending event)
Attention seeking (e.g., words that solicit attention to child or to aspects of environment)
Greetings (e.g., hi, bye)