Carina Lüke

Impact of speech-generating devices on the language development of a child with childhood apraxia of speech: a case study

Abstract Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of speech-generating devices (SGDs) on the communication and language development of a 2-year-old boy with severe childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Methods: An A-B design was used over a treatment period of 1 year, followed by three additional follow-up measurements, in order to evaluate the implementation of SGDs in the speech therapy of a 2;7-year-old boy with severe CAS. In total, 53 therapy sessions were videotaped and analyzed to better understand his communicative (operationalized as means of communication) and linguistic (operationalized as intelligibility and consistency of speech-productions, lexical and grammatical development) development. The trend-lines of baseline phase A and intervention phase B were compared and percentage of non-overlapping data points were calculated to verify the value of the intervention. Results: The use of SGDs led to an immediate increase in the communicative development of the child. An increase in all linguistic variables was observed, with a latency effect of eight to nine treatment sessions. Conclusions: The implementation of SGDs in speech therapy has the potential to be highly effective in regards to both communicative and linguistic competencies in young children with severe CAS. Implications for Rehabilitation Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a neurological speech sound disorder which results in significant deficits in speech production and lead to a higher risk for language, reading and spelling difficulties. Speech-generating devices (SGD), as one method of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), can effectively enhance the communicative and linguistic development of children with severe CAS.

An Interactive View on the Development of Deictic Pointing in Infancy

In this review, we will focus on the development of deictic pointing gestures. We propose that they are based on infants’ sensitivities to human motion. Since both conventionalized gestures and bodily movements can be interpreted as communicative, of special interest to us is how pointing gestures are employed within early social interactions. We push forward the idea of a conventionalization process taking place when the interaction partners guide infants’ participation toward joint goals. On their way to deploy pointing gestures and thus to successfully influence the partner for a specific purpose, infants need also to disengage from their own object perception or manipulation. In addition, infants accompany their gestures increasingly with verbal utterances—this form of communication is multimodal and offers the possibility to combine modalities for the purpose of expressing more complex utterances. The multimodal behavior will be picked up by caregivers and extended into linguistically more complex forms. Because of this emerging relationship to language and its social use, gestural behavior in early infancy is a powerful predictor for later language development.

Studien zur Mehrsprachigkeit: Beiträge der Dortmunder Arbeitsgruppe

Over the last two years researchers of the TU Dortmund University, Department of Language and Communication, have been conducting a number of empirical studies on bilingualism in childhood and adolescence. Special emphasis was placed on bilingualism in the context of speech and language pathology. The overview presented summarizes main research questions and results regarding aspects of the phenomena, trait differences, anamnesis, diagnosis, and intervention.

Wie kann der sprachliche Sozialisationskontext eines mehrsprachigen Kindes schnell und übersichtlich erfasst werden

In der Grafik kann der Typus des Kindes in Bezug auf die multilinguale Sprachentwicklung eintragen werden. Mit Typus ist der Umgang des Kindes mit dem mehrsprachigen Kontext gemeint. Im ersten Fall (Typus multilingual) scheint das Kind Spas am Sprachwechsel zu haben. Diese Kinder ubernehmen gern die Rolle eines Ubersetzers und sind stolz auf ihre multiplen Sprachkompetenzen. Im zweiten Fall (Typus monolingual) scheint die Mehrsprachigkeit eine Hurde fur das Kind darzustellen, der es am liebsten aus dem Weg gehen wurde. Das Kind druckt eine Praferenz fur eine der verfugbaren Sprachen aus und ist eher gehemmt auf Anforderung die Sprache zu wechseln. Hintergrund