Lecture 13 - Language Impairment Flashcards
several conditions are related to difficulties in spoken language acquisition:
- hearing impairment
- intellectual impairments
- autism/PDD
- specific language impairment
hearing impairment
spoken language learning issues because they’re not getting language input
not an intellectual impairment!
- 1 million kids in US, 90% to hearing parents
- Most prelingually deaf (occasionally they’ll get an infection that causes them to lose hearing but mostly born deaf)
- Trouble developing oral language (no auditory model to serve as a teaching signal: no representation of adult models)
• This cascades into difficulty in language
comprehension, reading
• Difficulty is usually related to how profound the hearing loss is
intellectual impairments
down syndrome, William’s syndrome
specific language impairment
not terribly well defined: diagnosis of exclusion:
can’t find anything other intellectually wrong with a child except they have a lot of trouble with language
a note of skepticism
things to keep in mind
particularly with respect to autism, symptoms could be made better but not curable
parents are very motivated to seek solutions, and there are plenty of people to take advantage of them for lots of money - insist on higher standards of evidence
evidence-based practice
if it really works, it should stand up to a simple t-test
should be scientifically tested with an experiment that shows a statistical significance at the end
wide range of autism treatments have not gone through this process
hearing impairment
can we just fix it?
some solutions
- Not exactly.
- sometimes hearing aids can be used
- Cochlear implants (surgical) show some efficacy*
- Just lip-read? Is not as easy as it sounds.
Cochlear implants
– take a bunch of electrodes and stick it into the cochlea and the electrodes directly stimulate different places along the auditory nerve: MAJOR surgery: work well with adults, because they’re already learned speech (can fairly readily start understanding things), but with kids it’s trickier (babies can’t communicate comprehension or what they’re struggling with)
– Stimulate auditory nerve directly, past site of problem – Still not the same as actual speech input
– See improvements in language skills, esp. if implanted young, but not like real hearing
• Still need lots of educational support
– controversial: insult or threat to signed language/signed culture
why not lip reading as a solution for hearing impairment?
- Kids with residual hearing can have more success. The lips alone do not provide sufficient info to tell you what someone is saying (“olive juice” = “I love you”) = massive overlap of sounds that are different but look alike
- Some sounds not visible (Ex.: /l/, /g/, /k/): can’t see what is going on
- Some sounds look alike (/m/, /b/, /p/): what you see in places of articulation and duration
hearing impairment
phonology
– Not very intelligible, even with training
– CI: more intelligible, but still not great articulation
hearing impairment
language development, lexicon
– Reading skills, vocab max out @ 4th grade level
hearing impairment
grammar
– Poor grasp of English syntax (e.g. passives, etc.
that are hard for younger non-deaf children)
– Better to teach use of [written] language to
communicate effectively
Hearing impairment
• Educational philosophies
1) oral/aural
2) total communication
3) bilingual/bicultural
oral/aural
(verbal-auditory therapy)
trying to get kids to communicate in the spoken word modality
really didn’t work before cochlear implants
– Can be effective if cochlear implant, residual
hearing; resurgence due to implants
– Cued speech: handshapes to supplement lips (when lips aren’t producing visible differences)
Total communication
in response to poor outcomes from oral/aural
made up a sign system (NOT a langauge) that was yoked to English
Make up sign systems yoked to English (SEE - signed exact english)
problem: can’t do prosody, content words are more important in spoken english but function words (a, the, ing) get equal weight in SEE
Bilingual/bicultural (bi-bi)
– Learn ASL first, then transition English as second language = medium to teach English as spoken or written
– Good in principle, limited by teachers’ expertise (if you don’t live in a metropolitan area, don’t have access to a good ASL teacher)
– in a perfect world this is the best solution