DLD

Question 1

‘Developmental Language Disorder’ (DLD)

Answer 1

language disorder was not associated with a known

biomedical etiology

Question 2

DLD Semantic Development (Lexical)

Answer 2

Tends to be impoverished – size and diversity (MA TTR – lexical diversity)
• Slow to learn new words
• Require more exposure to novel words to learn them
• Difficulty retaining new word labels
• Encode fewer semantic features of newly learned items

Question 3

DLD Social Pragmatics Development

Answer 3

• Difficulties not as severe or qualitatively different as in children with ASD
• Do have difficulty on # measures
• Initiating and maintaining conversational topics
• Requesting and providing clarification
• Turn-taking
Difficulty integrating language and context
• Perspective taking – understanding of others minds
• Matching communicative style to social context
• Understanding emotion from a situational context
• Difficulty generating inferences about implicit information in discourse
• Need for social/pragmatic groups – not just for children with ASD

Question 4

DLD Discourse

Answer 4

Problems at both the microstructure and macrostructure levels
• Narrative production and comprehension
• Expository discourse production and comprehension
• Persuasive discourse production and comprehension

Question 5

DLD morphology

Answer 5

Omission/Inconsistent use of morphosyntactic markers in spontaneous speech
• Particularly morphemes that express tense and agreement
• Past tense –ed He walk_ to school yesterday
• Third person singular –s She walk- to school everyday
• Auxiliary I _ eating chocolate
• Copula I _ happy
• Plural He put the block_ in the box
• Possessive I want mommy_ cookie
• Articles Teddy is going in _ truck.
• Complementizer to He is going go home now

Question 6

What are the genetic factors that can result in DLD?

Answer 6

Genetic factors
• Neurobiological factors
• Brain structure
• Brain function

Question 7

DLD is a highly_____

Answer 7

inheritable

Question 8

____ genes have been associated with spoken language disorders
gENETIC FACTORS

Answer 8

FOXP2 (British family) and CNTNAP2 (ASD) on chromosome 7
• ATP2C2 and CMIP on chromosome 16
• KIAA0319 (SLI – language and reading development) on chromosome 6

Question 9

DLD NERUROBIOLOGICAL FACTORS

Answer 9

• Increased volume in the right and/or decreased volume in the left
hemisphere in inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions
• Larger putamen volume in right hemisphere and/or reduced volume
in left hemisphere
• Atypical caudate volume (both increased and decreased)

Question 10

Damage to this region, especially during childhood is associated
with language deficits

Answer 10

Cerebellum

Question 11

adults with DLD have shown

Answer 11

Adults with language impairment showed higher activation levels than their normal language
peers
• Suggests that more robust recruitment of language-learning regions was needed to support learning in the face of a language impairment
• This is consistent with findings of hyperactivation in dyslexia, a closely related and frequently
comorbid disorder

Question 12

DLD cognitive models

Answer 12

Auditory processing deficits

Limited working memory capacity

Question 13

Auditory processing deficits

Answer 13

• Temporal processing deficit
• Children with DLDs have difficulty perceiving sounds that are presented rapidly and are of short duration
• Could lead to selective impairments in morphosyntax
• Grammatical morphemes are signaled with unstressed phonemes of brief duration
that occur in a rapidly changing speech stream

Question 14

Auditory processing deficits study showed….

Answer 14

• Demonstrated poor auditory processing skills
• Demonstrated difficulties in processing amplitude rise times
• These difficulties were associated with difficulties in processing linguistic stress
• Likely that poor auditory processing, in combination with other cognitive factors (such as poorer phonological memory, weaker sustained attention) results in a reduced capacity to process the stress patterns in speech
• Stress perception is an important facilitator of ear

Question 15

Children with DLD evidence reduced

Answer 15

working memory

Question 16

How can deficits in pSTM affect language development?

Answer 16

• Permits children to establish stable, long-term phonological representations of new
words in long-term memory
• Need to be able to hold sentences in memory while they are analyzed

Question 17

There is wide variability in the quantity and quality of the language children
experience early in life

Answer 17

• Quantity – amount of language input
• Quality – type of language – lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, question
use, response contingency, turn-taking

Question 18

Intellectual Disability- Pragmatics

Answer 18

• Requires integration of cognitive, linguistic, and social-emotional cues
• Lags behind cognitive development
• But may not be qualitatively different

Question 19

Intellectual disability-Syntax and morphology

Answer 19

typical developmental sequence at delayed pace

Use shorter, less complex sentences

Question 20

Intellectual Disability- semantics

Answer 20

Vocabulary size may be more advanced than syntactic development

Question 21

Cognitive characteristics of Down Syndrome

Answer 21

Marked deficits in working memory
• Particularly verbal working memory
• Significant problems in executive function
• Response inhibition (impulse control), cognitive flexibility, planning, learning new
rules and applying them, problem solving

Question 22

language characteristics of Down Syndrome

Answer 22

Shorter less complex sentences
first words is significantly delayed
Expressive vocabulary impaired
pragmatics a relative strength
 navigating social interactions problems as they get older