EXAM 3: Language Development in Special Populations Flashcards
Deficits in sensory motor system: Deaf/Hard of hearing
Deaf-of-deaf children:
Gets taught/exposed to fluent ASL from birth
Deaf-of-hearing children
90% born to hearing parents
Educational approaches for deaf-of-hearing children
- Bilingual/Bicultural
ASL as natural language of deaf culture
ASL as primary language and Eng as second - Total Communication
Simultaneous uses of multiple communication techniques that enhances an individual’s ability to communicate - Auditory-oral method
Believes children with hearing impairment can develop listening/receptive language and expressive oral English
Emphasizes the usage of residual hearing, amplification, and speech therapy
Discourages signing
Courses of sign development of deaf-of-deaf children
Same course as spoken language development
Same stages in same order
Similar processes underlie acquisition of sign and spoken language
Oral language development in children with cochlear implants
Cochlear implant pathway: microphone behind ear, computer processer, cochlear implant, brain
If young and age of exposure is very young, children acquires language at same rate as hearing children and lessens the gap
Or they could maintain gap and lag behind, various factors
Deficits in sensory motor system: Blindness
Language development builds on nonverbal communication
i.e. Mcgurke effect shows importance of visual cues to language, especially phonological development
Blindness and phonological development
Highly visible articulatory movements, blind children did worse and sighted children did better
i.e. m,b,p
Nonvisible articulatory movements, sighted and blind children did the same
i.e. k,g,t
Visible information (aka lip configuration) contributes to phonological development, but otherwise normal
Blindness and Pragmatics/conversations
Blind children had more difficulty with following conversation, pragmatics, and keeping maxims
Were also less likely to initiate topic and were mostly self-oriented topics
Maxims
Cooperative principle; rules that govern a conversation
Implicit rules that we TEND to follow
4 types:
1. Quality
2. Quantity
3. Relevance
4. Manner
- Quality
Info we provide in a conversation must be true. If it is a lie, it is violated
- Quantity
Should provide sufficient amount of information, not too much or too little
- Relevance
Conversation must be relevant to the topic at hand
- Manner
The way you make contribution should be clear, concise, and quick
Anderson (1993)
Showed blind children have a hard time with producing coherent and cohesive conversation, struggles with relevance
Landau claims…
Blind and sighted children have no difference in early vocab, semantics, and syntax
Chomsky claims…
Blind children acquire language more rapidly because they are dependent on it, more auditory reliance because no visual modality
Down syndrome
Language tends to be more impaired than other cognitive functions
Especially struggles with grammar and more difficulty producing than understanding
Strengths of communicative and pragmatic development
Williams syndrome
Disassociation of language and cognition
Same ID (IQ) as those with DS but better language skills, same language skills as those with higher IQ (SLI)
Discrepancy between language skills and general cognition
Highly sociable and emotive, unusual attention to face and voice
Evidence that mental capacity for language is separate from general mental capacity
Williams syndrome v. Down syndrome
Study:
WS and DS students with similar ID (IQ) and age each had same picture book and was asked to narrate the pictures
Results:
WS students had longer, more detailed and higher MLU
Less errors
Very emotively told
DS students had shorter, more errors and lower MLU
Demonstrates the disassociation between language and cognition and their separate/independency
Williams Syndrome and vocab
Much higher vocab compared to cognition
Further shows the disassociation of language and cognition
While vocab may be a strength…
Still lags behind TD children
WS and higher attention to facial processing/language processing
WS children have more attention to language-processing and facial processing compared to TD children, potential cause of their advanced language skills in comparison to their lower mental cognitive abilities
Shows that those with WS show high sociability as well
Autism
Impaired language, communication and social development
Marked by low interest in people and no preference for motherese or mom’s voice
Rare prelingual gestures and gesture usage weak correlation to vocab and no correlation to word comprehension
Brain scans reveal that they have larger brains than average
Highly agreed that those with autism develop language differently
Autism and motherese
Study: 653 toddlers aged 12-18 months old
eye tracking test to quantify interest in motherese
Tested three situations:
1. Motherese v. Traffic
2. Motherese v. Techno
3. Motherese v. Monotone
Results:
Fixation on motherese significantly reduced in toddlers with ASD
If toddler fixated on motherese at or below 30%, ASD 94%
ASD child’s level of attention toward motherese related to social and language abilities
ASD Attention to motherese and expressive/receptive language
The more attention they give to motherese-> greater receptive and expressive language
Autism and gesture
Correlation between gesture usage and vocab
Early gesture use, early vocab, but weak correlation
No correlation between gesture usage and word comprehension
Suggests children with ASD learn vocab in different ways than TD children; same input, different processing
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
Isolable, distinct disorder that only affects language development and nothing else
Excluded if extraneous cause
Children with SLI not equally impaired in all departments of language
Especially delayed in grammatical morphology; tense and agreement markers
SLI Cause/markers
Impaired phonological memory
non word repetition task significantly worse for SLI and heritable deficit
Language acquisition depends on phonological memory
Nonlinguistic minor cognitive deficits
limited in general processing capacity and processes info more slowly
More cognitive deficits than solely language
SLI v. WS v. TD
Results confirm that general cognitive abilities and language develop independently as SLI has better cognitive skills than WS but same language skills as WS
