Eva Aguilar-Mediavilla

A comparative study of the phonology of pre-school children with specific language impairment (SLI), language delay (LD) and normal acquisition.

The phonology of two groups of SLI (n =5) and LD (n =5) children was analysed at age 3 and compared with two control groups: an age control (n =5) and a language level control (measured using the MLU-W) (n =5). Children with SLI and LD showed a delay in the acquisition of segments, syllabic structures and word structures, and in the simplification processes, compared with their age control group. However, SLI children also displayed significant differences vis-à-vis their language level controls, mainly in early acquisitions: vowels, nasals and stops at the segmental level, and in CV structures at the syllabic level. There is also a simplification process that seems to be more prevalent in these children than in their language level controls, namely, the deletion of unstressed syllables, mainly initial ones. The results enable SLI to be distinguished from LD and suggest that the development of SLI phonology is deviant. This deviation is interpreted as being a plateau in early acquisitions when later acquisitions have already appeared. The results are considered in the light of Leonards surface hypothesis and an exclusively linguistic cause for this disorder is ruled out.

Influence of phonology on morpho‐syntax in Romance languages in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

BACKGROUND The profiles of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ greatly according to the language they speak. The Surface Hypothesis attempts to explain these differences through the theory that children with SLI will incorrectly produce elements in their language with low phonological weights or that are produced in a non-canonical prosodic structure. AIMS Previous studies have shown that the most characteristics errors produced by Catalan and Spanish-speaking children with SLI include function word omission (morpho-syntax) and weak syllable omission (phonology). The omission of function words points to a morpho-syntactic explanation of SLI, while weak syllable omission supports a phonological explanation of SLI. Yet, function words are weak syllables; thus, it is possible that the same mechanism underlies both problems. METHODS & PROCEDURES Data were extracted from spontaneous language produced by five children with SLI and five comparison children matched for age and MLU-w. They were assessed on two occasions: at 3;10 and 4;9 years of age. These interviews were then transcribed and the morphological and phonological errors coded. A non-parametric mean analysis and various regression analyses were conducted. OUTCOMES & RESULTS The results show that function word omission and weak syllable omission were the most characteristic errors made by Spanish and Catalan-speaking children with SLI and established that omissions increase as prosodic weight decreases. They also indicated that weak syllabic omission may explain most function word omissions. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS The data support the Surface Hypothesis and suggest that the same impaired mechanism may underlie the morphological and phonological problems SLI children display.

Phonological profile of Spanish-Catalan children with specific language impairment at age 4: are there any changes over time?

The phonology of a group of Spanish-Catalan children with specific language impairment (SLI, n = 5), who had been analysed at age 3;10, is now analysed at age 4;09 and compared with two control groups: an age-matched control (n = 5) and a language level control (measured using the mean length of utterance by words; n = 5). The children with SLI continue to show a delay in the acquisition of segments, syllabic structures and in the use of the simplification processes, but not in word structures, compared with their age-matched controls. Children with SLI also display significant differences compared with their language level controls, but not in the same areas as observed at age 3: the differences are now in nasals and liquids at the segmental level, and in CCV, CVC and other complex structures at the syllabic level. There are also some simplification processes that seem to be more prevalent in these children than in their language level controls: absence of trill, cluster reductions and consonant deletions. The results enable us to interpret SLI as more than a delayed development and to show the differences in the profiles over time.

Early preschool processing abilities predict subsequent reading outcomes in bilingual Spanish-Catalan children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI).

UNLABELLED Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have severe language difficulties without showing hearing impairments, cognitive deficits, neurological damage or socio-emotional deprivation. However, previous studies have shown that children with SLI show some cognitive and literacy problems. Our study analyses the relationship between preschool cognitive and linguistic abilities and the later development of reading abilities in Spanish-Catalan bilingual children with SLI. The sample consisted of 17 bilingual Spanish-Catalan children with SLI and 17 age-matched controls. We tested eight distinct processes related to phonological, attention, and language processing at the age of 6 years and reading at 8 years of age. Results show that bilingual Spanish-Catalan children with SLI show significantly lower scores, as compared to typically developing peers, in phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatized naming (RAN), together with a lower outcome in tasks measuring sentence repetition and verbal fluency. Regarding attentional processes, bilingual Spanish-Catalan children with SLI obtained lower scores in auditory attention, but not in visual attention. At the age of 8 years Spanish-Catalan children with SLI had lower scores than their age-matched controls in total reading score, letter identification (decoding), and in semantic task (comprehension). Regression analyses identified both phonological awareness and verbal fluency at the age of 6 years to be the best predictors of subsequent reading performance at the age of 8 years. Our data suggest that language acquisition problems and difficulties in reading acquisition in bilingual children with SLI might be related to the close interdependence between a limitation in cognitive processing and a deficit at the linguistic level. LEARNING OUTCOMES After reading this article, readers will be able to: identify their understanding of the relation between language difficulties and reading outcomes; explain how processing abilities influence reading performance in bilingual Spanish-Catalan children with SLI; and recognize the relation between language and reading via a developmental model in which the phonological system is considered central for the development of decoding abilities and comprehension.

Is bilingualism losing its advantage? A bibliometric approach

This study uses several bibliometric indices to explore the temporal course of publication trends regarding the bilingual advantage in executive control over a ten-year window. These indices include the number of published papers, numbers of citations, and the journal impact factor. According to the information available in their abstracts, studies were classified into one of four categories: supporting, ambiguous towards, not mentioning, or challenging the bilingual advantage. Results show that the number of papers challenging the bilingual advantage increased notably in 2014 and 2015. Both the average impact factor and the accumulated citations as of June 2016 were equivalent between categories. However, of the studies published in 2014, those that challenge the bilingual advantage accumulated more citations in June 2016 than those supporting it. Our findings offer evidence-based bibliometric information about the current state of the literature and suggest a change in publication trends regarding the literature on the bilingual advantage.

Reading skills in young adolescents with a history of Specific Language Impairment: The role of early semantic capacity

UNLABELLED This study assessed the reading skills of 19 Spanish-Catalan children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 16 age-matched control children. Children with SLI have difficulties with oral language comprehension, which may affect later reading acquisition. We conducted a longitudinal study examining reading acquisition in these children between 8 and 12 years old and we relate this data with early oral language acquisition at 6 years old. Compared to the control group, the SLI group presented impaired decoding and comprehension skills at age 8, as evidenced by poor scores in all the assessed tasks. Nevertheless, only text comprehension abilities appeared to be impaired at age 12. Individual analyses confirmed the presence of comprehension deficits in most of the SLI children. Furthermore, early semantic verbal fluency at age 6 appeared to significantly predict the reading comprehension capacity of SLI participants at age 12. Our results emphasize the importance of semantic capacity at early stages of oral language development over the consolidation of reading acquisition at later stages. LEARNING OUTCOMES Readers will recognize the relevance of prior oral language impairment, especially semantic capacity, in children with a history of SLI as a risk factor for the development of later reading difficulties.

Longitudinal trajectories of the representation and access to phonological information in bilingual children with specific language impairment

Purpose: Language development in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is still poorly understood, especially if children with SLI are bilingual. This study describes the longitudinal trajectory of several linguistic abilities in bilingual children with SLI relative to bilingual control children matched by their age and socioeconomic status. Method: A set of measures of non-word repetition, sentence repetition, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming and verbal fluency were collected at three time points, from 6–12 years of age using a prospective longitudinal design. Result: Results revealed that, at all ages, children with SLI obtained lower values in measures of sentence repetition, non-word repetition, phonological fluency and phonological awareness (without visual cues) when compared to typically-developing children. Other measures, such as rapid automatic naming, improved over time, given that differences at 6 years of age did not persist at further moments of testing. Other linguistic measures, such as phonological awareness (with visual cues) and semantic fluency were equivalent between both groups across time. Conclusion: Children with SLI manifest persistent difficulties in tasks involved in manipulating segments of words and in maintaining verbal units active in phonological working memory, while other abilities, such as the access to underlying phonological representations are unaffected.

Language Development in Bilingual Spanish-Catalan Children with and Without Specific Language Impairment: A Longitudinal Perspective

The present chapter explores both the cognitive and linguistic development of bilingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and focuses on Spanish and Catalan languages. We first describe some similarities between Monolingual and Bilingual language acquisition and how Bilingual children reach most of the milestones at the same age as monolinguals, despite having less exposure to each language separately. We refer to different characteristics of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition and discuss some variables that influence this process, such as the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics that influence bilingual language acquisition and proficiency. One such variable is the status of each language in the social context. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual when compared with monolinguals in cognitive tasks related to information access and storage in long-term memory. We present several studies describing the development of monolingual children with SLI to establish a basis for comparing bilingual children with SLI. We mention some studies which have explored cognitive abilities in bilingual children with SLI; some studies finding compensating abilities and some others finding a “bilingual disadvantage”. We show several studies with different outcomes depending on the type of bilingualism, such as the differences between sequential bilinguals as compared to simultaneous bilingual children. Finally, we present a series of studies that have investigated phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic and pragmatic characteristics of bilingual Spanish-Catalan development in children with and without SLI. Executive functions related to both cognitive and language processing in bilingual Spanish-Catalan acquisition are also shown. The chapter ends with some research which have analyzed reading abilities and social interaction in this population.