Carol Westby

Evaluating Theory of Mind Development

live instructions on how to engage with the different elements of the app. Each time you log on, it displays a different emotion and explains the cause of the emotion. You then select 3 words that describe how you feel. When you tap a word, you hear the meaning and see a face expressing that emotion. A young person’s voice relates an experience in which he or she felt one of those ways The app uses more than 50 emotion words, getting beyond the basic emotions of happy, sad, mad, surprised, disgusted, and afraid, enabling discussions of varying intensities of emotions. The app has four sections: What’s the Word, My Life, My Stuff, and My Games. The What’s the Word section shows a face with accompanying emotion word and explains the meaning of the word. In the My Life section, there are three activities that can help describe your moods. The Mood Dude is a figure that can be configured to your mood. Touching parts of the figure’s body changes its facial expressions and arms/hands positions. There is a Mad Libs-type mood tale where you choose words to create a mood tale. The student selects a photograph that shows a person or persons displaying emotions. Like other Mad Libs, the student is guided through selecting different kinds of words. When all words are selected, the story appears and is read aloud. In the Moodosphere, you can see your mood on a map. The moods you selected each time you logged in are tracked so that you can look at the emotion words you selected over a period of time. In the My Games section, students match facial expressions to emotion words. “Pets Versus Monsters” is a ball game. An emotion word appears at the top of the screen and is read. Then balls with faces showing different emotions are thrown. By touching the screen, the student positions the batter to hit the ball with the faces that match the emotion word (and avoid those faces that do not match). In “Prankster Madness,” a face with an emotional expression appears at the top of the screen. Goo balls and water balls with emotion words fall from the sky (a voice reads the words). The player controls a character on a skateboard by tilting the iPad. The goal is to catch the word that describes the emotion on the face, while avoiding the goo balls and water balls with the wrong words. In “Hey You Guys, Catch,” faces with a variety of expressions move across a park scene. Word balls with emotion words run along the bottom of the screen. The player loads a word ball in the launcher and must shoot it at the appropriate face. Finally, the My Stuff section of the app can be customized by adding your own pictures, songs, and videos to it. The pictures (which you can tag on the screen with stickers indicating how the photos make you feel songs) and videos that are included can be used to provide opportunities to describe and discuss the emotions conveyed. This app could be very helpful with children who are having difficulty in social situations such as those with social communicative pragmatic disorders or with autism spectrum disorders. The app was developed with the cooperation of Military Families Near and Far, an organization that helps military families to communicate, stay connected, and cope with the transitions and issues related to military life. If you work with military families, check out the website https://www. familiesnearandfar.org/login/. The website is in English and Spanish.

Theory of Mind Deficits in Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing

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Deaf Children’s Emotion Recognition:

When children with severe prelingual deafness are not exposed to natural (sign) language from infancy, they exhibit pronounced delays in social knowledge and competence and social adjustment (Weisel & Bar-Lev, 1992). Researchers have suggested that these difficulties are a direct effect of delays in language acquisition and missed opportunities to converse with others (e.g., Peterson & Siegal, 1998). Among the social impairments documented in the deaf population are mentalizing problems and deficits in theory of mind (ToM; that is, understanding of others’ emotions and actions). These difficulties have been observed in congenitally deaf children of hearing nonsigning parents (Peterson & Siegal, 1999), but they are less likely to be found in deaf children of deaf parents who sign. Another crucial component of social cognition that may be affected by deafness is the ability to understand other people’s emotions (Rieffe & Terwogt, 2000). Although such deficits are less well documented than ToM deficits, findings from several studies suggest that deaf children are more prone to errors in recognizing facial expressions of emotion than are their hearing controls. Some studies have revealed the emotion recognition deficits in deaf children were comparable with those reported in children with autism (Dyck, Farrugia, Shochet, & Homes-Brown, 2004). The mechanisms underlying these emotion recognition deficits in deaf children and adolescents are poorly understood, and it is currently unclear whether they are specific to social stimuli, thereby reflecting their atypical experience, or reflect more general abnormalities in visual perceptual information-processing strategies. The aim of the current study was to determine whether deaf children, who experience difficulties in processing emotions on faces, will manifest atypical perceptual processing strategies in response to face stimuli. A newsletter dedicated to speech & language in school-age children

Explaining Comprehension in Children With Autism

Research shows that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulties with comprehension, particularly with inferential processing (IP). Children with autism are characterized by a detailed focused cognitive style that has been termed weak central coherence (WCC). Little research on the relatedness of inferencing difficulties and WCC has been conducted; therefore, this study was conducted to further knowledge of language-processing difficulties in autism. Children with high-functioning autism sometimes exhibit relatively spared structural language skills but significant comprehension deficits. They frequently have severe difficulties using contextual cues to understand the meaning of interactions. They particularly have deficits in making inferences to fill in information that is not explicitly stated in a message. Researchers (Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 2000; Norbury & Bishop, 2002) have found that children with high-functioning autism were less able to make inferences about spoken narratives than typically developing children despite comparable performance on factual questions. These findings indicate that persons with high-functioning autism demonstrate difficulties with IP, which appears to reflect an inability to integrate the immediate context with their own content knowledge. Message comprehension requires an integration of meanings of individual words, sentences, and paragraphs, as well as key ideas and themes. Information from various sources needs to be incorporated as a whole, using gestalt-like global processing. Instead of using global processing (the processing style in typically developing individuals), individuals with autism are biased to process information on a local level, with particular attention to detail; they have a WCC (Frith, 1989). By contrast, typically developing individuals are characterized by a strong central coherence. As comprehension requires global processing, this local processing bias may account for some comprehension problems in autism. The processing of narratives requires three key skills: the ability to infer causal relationships between events, to distinguish the goal and internal states of the people mentioned, and to conceptually integrate different sections of the story or account (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994). Many interrelated skills are common to communicative and narrative comprehension, including vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, and prepositional and relational concepts. In addition, short-term auditory memory and attention skills are important. Therefore, studying verbal narrative comprehension can provide information on comprehension of fictional stories and comprehension in conversational contexts. For a narrative to be taken as a coherent unit, IP skills are required to build a mental representation (Graesser et al., 1994; Skarakis-Doyle & Dempsey, 2008). Consider the following example (Charniak, 1972):

Why Children With Autism Are More at Risk for the Negative Effects of Screen Time

that these criteria may fail to identify students who have language impairments that are significantly affecting their social and academic achievement. The authors of this article demonstrated that adolescents with TBI might have syntactic skills similar to typical developing children but have significant deficits in comprehending and producing expository texts. In an article in Word of Mouth 29:3, Volden and colleagues (Volden et al., 2017) demonstrated that a number of 8and 9-yearold children with autism exhibited significant deficits on a narrative assessment that were not detected by their performance on the Clinical Evaluation of Language–4 (CELF-4; Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2003). SLPs are required to use evidence-based practices. They need to use the evidence from articles such as these to argue against decisions for qualifying students for services that are based only on scores from standardized language batteries.

Summarization of Expository Texts by Students With Traumatic Brain Injury

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Cognitive Load and Learning

as easily made on the basis of bilingual students’ microstructure performance. A student tells a story with ageappropriate narrative macrostructure but with less age-appropriate microstructure. Delays and differences in microstructure skills are more likely to be related to second-language learning issues than are delays or differences in macrostructure skills. However, this study also indicates that bilingual students with PLI are much slower to make changes in microstructure skills than macrostructure skills. The rubric used in this study (which is readily available) has been shown to be sensitive to developmental changes in narrative microand macrostructure and, hence, could be useful as part of response to intervention (RtI) or part of dynamic assessments of bilingual students.

Learning Academic Vocabulary in First through Third Grade

Vocabulary serves as a pivotal link between oral and written language (National Reading Panel [NRP], 2000). Students with limited vocabularies are at risk for difficulties in developing fluent reading skills and in comprehending reading passages (Nash & Donaldson, 2005; Scarborough, 2005). For children who are at risk for reading disabilities due to limited vocabulary, explicit teaching may be particularly important (Coyne, McCoach, Loftus, Zipoli, & Kapp, 2009; Foorman & Torgesen, 2001). To determine the potential for overcoming limited vocabularies, there is a need to examine the effects of explicit vocabulary instruction for children identified with developmental delays as well as children at risk for language and reading disabilities. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent children in low-income schools learn novel academic vocabulary words as a result of explicit vocabulary instruction.

Identifying Children With Social Communication Impairments

The majority of states and school districts require the use of standardized test batteries to qualify students with language impairments for special education services. Typically, children must perform 1.5 to 2.0 standard deviations (SDs) below the mean on these batteries. Most of the current language assessment batteries in use for school-age students do not assess skills beyond the sentence level. High functioning children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may not exhibit obvious deficits on such batteries, yet they exhibit obvious difficulties in social communication and pragmatic language skills. Because high functioning children with ASD may be performing academically at grade level and have standard scores (SS) on language batteries in the average range, they do not qualify for services.

Adverse Childhood Experiences: What Speech-Language Pathologists Need to Know

Life cannot be stress free. Learning how to cope with adversity is an important part of healthy development. When we are threatened, our heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones increase. When a young child’s stress response systems are activated within an environment of supportive relationships with adults, these physiological effects are buffered. However, if the stress response is extreme and long-lasting, and buffering relationships are unavailable to the child, the result can be damaged neurological systems repercussions affecting all aspects of child development and health. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have serious, long-term impacts on a child’s health and well-being by contributing to high levels of toxic stress that derail healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. The original ACEs study (Felitti et al., 1998) considered 10 ACEs: five ACEs were personal to the child: emotional, physical abuse, and sexual abuse; and emotional and physical neglect; and five ACEs were related to other family members: witnessing domestic violence, living with someone who abused substances, was mentally ill, was imprisoned, or absence of parent through death, divorce, or abandonment. The study was continued in later years, sometimes adding additional ACEs such as urban ACE indicators (racism, witnessing violence; living in an unsafe neighborhood, living in foster care, experiencing bullying), caregiver leaving for military deployment, or experiencing natural disasters or war. Data show that 33% of children with two or more ACEs have a chronic health condition involving a special health care need, compared with 13.6% of children without ACEs (Felitti & Anda, 2010). Nationally, more than 46% of U.S. youth have had at least one ACE and more than 20% have had at least two. Children ages 3 to 5 years who have had two or more ACEs are over 4 times more likely to have trouble calming themselves down, be easily distracted, and have a hard time making and keeping friends. More than three out of four children ages 3 to 5 years who have been expelled from A newsletter dedicated to speech & language in school-age children