Language impairment Flashcards
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)
condition characterized by “language problems that are severe enough to interfere with daily life, have a poor prognosis and are not associated with a clear biomedical etiology” (Bishop et al. 2017: 1078);
(a) presence of risk factors (neurobiological or environmental) does not preclude a diagnosis of DLD, (b) DLD can co-occur with other neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. ADHD)
(c) DLD does not require a mismatch between verbal and nonverbal
ability
childhood apraxia of speech
Common comorbidity with DLD, difficulty coordinating articulatory gestures due to poor motor planning.
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
Old name for DLD (changed because excluded children with other conditions besides a language impairment)
Approximately ___% of children have SLI/DLD
7.5
Percentage of consonants correct (PCC)
A representative sample of language with PCC provides a valid assessment of the presence and severity of language impairment
Problem with phonology in DLD
Difficulty repeating non-words with consonant clusters (complex onsets and coda-onset clusters)
Problems with inflection in the phonological domain with DLD
Phonotactically illegal in monomorphemic words : [hʌɡd] ‘hugged’
- -ed was much higher with inflected verbs ending in a phonotactically legal cluster (words like pack) than with verbs ending in an illegal cluster (words like hug)
Problems with inflection in the morphological domain with DLD
Children with DLD lack morphological rules for productive formation of inflectionally complex words (Gopnik & Crago 1991, Gopnik & Goad 1997);
* Instead, they learn and store inflectionally complex words as unanalysed chunks;
* Regular inflection is thus represented in the same way as irregular inflection;
* Example: ‘walked’ is not analysed as walk + ed but is stored as walked, similar to an irregular verb like ran; just memorizing
If children with DLD lack rules for productive formation of inflected forms, how can they produce any inflected novel forms?
Further probing of plural productions for both novel and real words reveals ~75% non-target-like productions (Goad 1998; UK data);
* ~60% of non-target-like productions result from an explicitly taught rule: “you form plurals through adding s”
So the kids are producing inflection, but the forms display unusual errors
E.g. dogs was produced with an [s] at the end instead of [z] due to substitution of novel form with known, memorized form
Extended optional infinitives explanation of DLD
The difficulties that children with DLD have with tense/agreement are because these children go through an extended optional infinitive period, compared to typically developing controls;
Predictions:
o Children should show **problems with tense/agreement and not with other types of grammatical morphology like plurals; the children will outgrow this
o When tense/agreement is supplied, it should be appropriate
Test of extended optional infinitives hypothesis
If the children are just slower, they should match language matched controls more than age-matched
- Their performance approaches that of language matched [LM] controls (performing the same on comprehension tasks) and is significantly worse than age-matched [AM] (same age) controls
- Children with DLD do not struggle with suppliance of plural -s, -ing, and the prepositions in/on
German evidence against extended optinal infinitive hypothesis
Finite and non-finite verbs appear in different positions in the German target grammar
- Although DLD children sometimes get the finiteness of the verb wrong, they overwhelmingly put the finite verb in second position (V2) and the non-finite verb at the end of the sentence.
- If DLD children lack morphological rules for productive formation of inflected forms, they should not show differences in verb placement depending on finiteness in German (incorrectly predicts random inflection, regardless of position of the verb)
If DLD children are in an extended optional infinitive stage, they should not show any difficulties with _____ morphology, but some children do.
Plural
- Although English-speaking children with DLD have been shown to struggle with both tense/agreement and plural morphology, not all inflectional morphology is equally problematic: children generally do better on _____ than on tense/agreement morphology.
Plural
