SLI

Question 1

Inclusion criteria for SLI

Answer 1

significant limitation in language ability

Question 2

Exclusion criteria for SLI

Answer 2

1. NVIQ outside normal range
2. sensory impairment (hearing or vision)
3. Presence of ASD
4. Presence of neurological damage

Question 3

Prevalence of SLI

Answer 3

~3%

Question 4

Gender differences in SLI

Answer 4

2 boys:1 girl

but boys tend to express themselves more, will be identified

Question 5

Family Hx language/learning problems

Answer 5

</= 20% immediate family members

Question 6

Epidemiological study of SLI

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

29% of parents reported having been informed child had speech or language problem. why?

Answer 7

• exclusionary criteria more obvious
• lots of variability in that period
• parents don’t notice language much, only notice when not talking at all

Question 8

Tomblin argues the cutoff for SLI should be…

Answer 8

-1.14 SDs below mean.

cutoffs for disorder should be more lenient to pick up more kids

Question 9

What is impaired in SLI?

Answer 9

• learning morphosyntax, specifically verbal morphology

- semantics and pragmatics intact

Question 10

Specific morphemes impaired in SLI

Answer 10

1. 3PS -s
2. past tense -ed
3. be & do
   * all tense morphemes

Question 11

What is less impaired in SLI?

Answer 11

1. present progressive
2. plural nouns
3. irregular past tense
4. articles

Question 12

Other characteristics of SLI

Answer 12

1. late emergence of grammatical development
2. protracted development
3. plateau in skills

Question 13

clinical markers of SLI

Answer 13

1. sentence repetition
2. nonword repetition
3. expressive grammatical morphology (especially tense marking)

Question 14

evidence on clinical markers in SLI

Answer 14

SLI & DS groups did worse than TD group on tense morphemes and sentence repetition, and non-tense morphemes
- nothing distinguished SLI from DS groups

Question 15

Italian SLI

Answer 15

1. difficulties with grammatical inflections take form of substitutions instead of omissions
2. problems with articles and clitics

Question 16

Spanish SLI

Answer 16

greater difficulty with noun, not verb, morphology

- adjective agreement inflections; plural noun forms; clitic pronouns; articles

Question 17

Hebrew SLI

Answer 17

1. slow lexical development
2. late word combinations
3. inflections marking number, gender, person, tense similar to MLU controls
4. 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

Question 18

Thordardottir SLI article - what is best at identifying kids with SLI

Answer 18

1. following directions
2. sentence imitation
3. nonword repetition
4. some expressive vocabulary

also, clinicians need more info about cutoff scores. if too strict, with miss portion of the population

Question 19

Early SLI profile

Answer 19

1. delayed 1st words
2. poorer “fast mapping” skills
3. more exposures required
4. limited generalization to new exemplars

Question 20

Preschool and early school years SLI profile

Answer 20

1. morphosyntactic deficits become more prominent
2. weak social skills
   - less likely to be chosen as preferred playmates

Question 21

Early elementary school SLI profile

Answer 21

1. morphosyntactic deficits remain prominent
2. many children with SLI develop reading and academic difficulties
3. narrative and discourse-level language difficulties emerge

Question 22

Progressing school years SLI profile

Answer 22

1. morphosyntax for basic sentence structure usually mastered
2. continued difficulty constructing complex sentences and narratives
3. higher level language impairments
   a. non-literal language: jokes, metaphors, idioms
   b. inferences
   c. recognition and resolution of linguistic ambiguity

Question 23

Children identified at age 5 as SLI ultimately have….

Answer 23

1. lower educational achievement
2. lower occupational achievement
3. fewer children
4. lower IQ, reading comprehension, and arithmetic skills

Question 24

Heterogeneity in SLI

Answer 24

not all children with SLI have same profile. maybe we are grouping more than on disorder into the SLI category

Question 25

Proposed subgroups of SLI

Answer 25

1. semantic-pragmatic disorder. more difficulty with use as opposed to form, but don’t meet criteria for autism
2. grammatical SLI - problems only with grammar
3. lexical/word-finding subgroup
   * no single subtyping system is universally accepted

Question 26

Cognitive profile of SLI

Answer 26

1. NVIQ WNL
   Poorer on
2. speed of processing
3. working memory
4. sustained attention
5. slower and/or less accurate on mental rotation task
6. slower on choice visual detection task (what color is the shape versus what is the shape?)
7. worse at spatial working memory task
8. worse at sustained selective attention task

Question 27

How could a child perform sub-optimally on cog tasks and still have NVIQ WNL?

Answer 27

saying below TD kids, but not in CLINICALLY impaired range.

partially about which specific tasks are assessed, partly about how impaired they are

Question 28

How could impairments in cog tasks relate to language learning

Answer 28

can’t remember what person said, can’t comment on it.

if you can’t process input as fast, not getting all of it

Question 29

Should you just focus on verb tense since its the most prominent deficit in SLI

Answer 29

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.