SLI Flashcards
Inclusion criteria for SLI
significant limitation in language ability
Exclusion criteria for SLI
- NVIQ outside normal range
- sensory impairment (hearing or vision)
- Presence of ASD
- Presence of neurological damage
Prevalence of SLI
~3%
Gender differences in SLI
2 boys:1 girl
but boys tend to express themselves more, will be identified
Family Hx language/learning problems
</= 20% immediate family members
Epidemiological study of SLI
- 7200 kindergarteners screened
- prevalence was 7.4%
- 1.33:1 male to female. not significant
- used vocabulary, grammar, narratives, comprehension, and expression
- if cutoff had been raised, SLI rate would drop to 1.12%
- good sensitivity and specificity
29% of parents reported having been informed child had speech or language problem. why?
- exclusionary criteria more obvious
- lots of variability in that period
- parents don’t notice language much, only notice when not talking at all
Tomblin argues the cutoff for SLI should be…
-1.14 SDs below mean.
cutoffs for disorder should be more lenient to pick up more kids
What is impaired in SLI?
- learning morphosyntax, specifically verbal morphology
- semantics and pragmatics intact
Specific morphemes impaired in SLI
- 3PS -s
- past tense -ed
- be & do
* all tense morphemes
What is less impaired in SLI?
- present progressive
- plural nouns
- irregular past tense
- articles
Other characteristics of SLI
- late emergence of grammatical development
- protracted development
- plateau in skills
clinical markers of SLI
- sentence repetition
- nonword repetition
- expressive grammatical morphology (especially tense marking)
evidence on clinical markers in SLI
SLI & DS groups did worse than TD group on tense morphemes and sentence repetition, and non-tense morphemes
- nothing distinguished SLI from DS groups
Italian SLI
- difficulties with grammatical inflections take form of substitutions instead of omissions
- problems with articles and clitics
Spanish SLI
greater difficulty with noun, not verb, morphology
- adjective agreement inflections; plural noun forms; clitic pronouns; articles
Hebrew SLI
- slow lexical development
- late word combinations
- inflections marking number, gender, person, tense similar to MLU controls
- fewer adult-like verbs overall - especially differences in weak initial and medial syllables
SLI not just broken brain module for learning verbs. there are many differences across languages
Thordardottir SLI article - what is best at identifying kids with SLI
- following directions
- sentence imitation
- nonword repetition
- some expressive vocabulary
also, clinicians need more info about cutoff scores. if too strict, with miss portion of the population
Early SLI profile
- delayed 1st words
- poorer “fast mapping” skills
- more exposures required
- limited generalization to new exemplars
Preschool and early school years SLI profile
- morphosyntactic deficits become more prominent
- weak social skills
- less likely to be chosen as preferred playmates
Early elementary school SLI profile
- morphosyntactic deficits remain prominent
- many children with SLI develop reading and academic difficulties
- narrative and discourse-level language difficulties emerge
Progressing school years SLI profile
- morphosyntax for basic sentence structure usually mastered
- continued difficulty constructing complex sentences and narratives
- higher level language impairments
a. non-literal language: jokes, metaphors, idioms
b. inferences
c. recognition and resolution of linguistic ambiguity
Children identified at age 5 as SLI ultimately have….
- lower educational achievement
- lower occupational achievement
- fewer children
- lower IQ, reading comprehension, and arithmetic skills
Heterogeneity in SLI
not all children with SLI have same profile. maybe we are grouping more than on disorder into the SLI category
Proposed subgroups of SLI
- semantic-pragmatic disorder. more difficulty with use as opposed to form, but don’t meet criteria for autism
- grammatical SLI - problems only with grammar
- lexical/word-finding subgroup
* no single subtyping system is universally accepted
Cognitive profile of SLI
- NVIQ WNL
Poorer on - speed of processing
- working memory
- sustained attention
- slower and/or less accurate on mental rotation task
- slower on choice visual detection task (what color is the shape versus what is the shape?)
- worse at spatial working memory task
- worse at sustained selective attention task
How could a child perform sub-optimally on cog tasks and still have NVIQ WNL?
saying below TD kids, but not in CLINICALLY impaired range.
partially about which specific tasks are assessed, partly about how impaired they are
How could impairments in cog tasks relate to language learning
can’t remember what person said, can’t comment on it.
if you can’t process input as fast, not getting all of it
Should you just focus on verb tense since its the most prominent deficit in SLI
No. Not functional to just focus on verb tense because can still understanding what child is saying when they mess up the verb tense. target other things too.