Gary Holdgrafer

Pragmatic language disorder and perspective taking in autistic speakers

The relationship between pragmatic referential communication skill and the cognitive ability to assess and assume another persons conceptual viewpoint was investigated in the autistic population. Ten high functioning autistic adolescents and young adults were matched for age and sex to normally developing controls and given referential communication and perspectivetaking tasks that had been previously demonstrated to be of comparable complexity. The groups were selected to be similar in terms of language skill.But despite their intact, elementary perspective-taking skills, the autistic subjects displayed significant communicative dysfunction. This suggests that factors other than a deficiency in the development of a “theory of mind” are significant contributors to the social communicative disorder associated with autism.

Cognitive and Language Development of Healthy Preterm Infants at 10 Years of Age

In this longitudinal study, forty-three Canadian 10-year-olds, 20 born preterm without significant health problems and 23 born at term, were compared. Cognitive development was measured by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III. Language development was measured by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamen-tals-3 (CELF-3) and language used in a 5 minute interview. The children born preterm had subtle delays. They scored significantly lower on Performance IQ and the CELF-3. The subtests on which they had lower scores appear to require visual-spatial skills. Early intervention focusing on parent behaviours that encourage language development and early screening for delays in visual-spatial skills may be useful.

Early communication development in children with Rett syndrome

This retrospective pilot study investigated the course of pre-linguistic and linguistic communication development in children with Rett syndrome (RS) from birth to 24 months of age. Parents of 17 children with RS completed a questionnaire based on the Clinical Linguistic Auditory Milestone Scale. No child exceeded single word use and most children had begun to regress. Pre-regression delay was in evidence along with limited intentional gestural communication as a precursor to single word use. Limited use of communicative gestures is suggested as a possible early predictor of RS pending further investigation.

Comprehension and production of word order by 2-year-old children

This study is an attempt to test the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975) that (1) productive control of the subject-object relation exceeds comprehension performance based on syntactic form alone, and (2) less linguistically advanced children decode subject-object relations lacking referential support on the basis of a lexical-semantic strategy that assigns animate nouns to subject status and inanimate nouns to object status. Ten children, divided on the basis of mean length of utterance into two groups (average MLU of 2.45 and 3.75, respectively), participated. Comprehension and production of subject-order in semantically reversible sentences with inanimate or animate subject and object was assessed using an object manipulation format. The results obtained provided partial support for the predictions made by Chapman and Miller (1975). The proposed lexical-semantic strategy for comprehension was not employed by the subjects of the present study; these children appeared to use a probable event strategy in determining subject-object assignment. Although productive control of the ordering of subject and object was found to exceed comprehension performance, the facilitating effect of visual cues available during the production trials likely contributed to the observed differences in performance between the two tasks.

Language Abilities of Neurologically Normal and Suspect Preterm Children Now in Preschool

Multiple aspects of speech and language performance of 29 four- to five-year-old preterm children (10 neurologically suspect) were assessed. Data were collected using a variety of measures including standardized tests and analysis of language samples. Each childs performance was compared with reference data on the various outcomes which yielded an over-all pass score and individual profiles of performance. Neurologically normal children had significantly higher passing scores than suspect children but appeared to be at risk for mild language delays, particularly in morphosyntactic development. Neurologically suspect children appeared to be at risk for moderate and more generalized language delays, including morphosyntactic and phonological development.

Communicative Competence: From Research to Practice

A model of communicative development is described that includes seven progressively more complex levels of competence and a set of six criteria (communicative features) for assignment of individual behaviors to particular developmental levels. Research evidence documenting the progressive changes in the genesis of communicative competence is reviewed and synthesized. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the communication model for assessment and intervention purposes.

Children's Comprehension of Intonation as a Marker for Discourse Topic Collaboration.

Two prerecorded productions of the “Whats this?” question were presented to Grade 2, 4, and 6 children and to adults over a series of trials in a referential communication task. One production contained emphatic stress on the word “this” and the other production contained equal stress on both words. For each question presentation the experimenter selected a colored picture of an object from a deck that was the match to one of two picture choices in view of the subjects. The students guessed on successive presentations whether a different picture (new topic collaboration) or the same picture (old topic collaboration) had been selected based on the presence or absence of emphatic stress in the questions. No feedback was given to the students throughout the experimental procedure. Use of intonation as a marker for topic collaboration appeared by Grade 4, which is in support of other similar research.

QUANTITY OF COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOR IN CHILDREN FROM BIRTH TO 30 MONTHS

68 normal children were observed during play interaction with their mothers. Childrens communicative acts were coded according to form and function, based on seven levels of communicative competence. Seven age groups, corresponding to the developmental predominance of each, were formed from birth to 30 mo. Each included equal numbers of girls and boys. Total number of communicative acts were determined for each child. Girls produced significantly more communicative output than boys. Verbal children produced significantly more output than preverbal children. There were no significant differences between preverbal groups or between verbal groups. The results are discussed relative to other research.

Turntaking and pragmatic language skills of developmentally delayed children: a research note.

The purpose of this study was to assess the turntaking skills and pragmatic language skills of four mildly to moderately developmentally delayed children relative to the performance of both skills by a group of 14 normally developing children

Mode-Relations in Language Learning by Language-Deficient Retarded Subjects

The relationship between language comprehension and production was examined with two severely language-deficient retarded subjects who were taught the plural form /z/. Comprehension and production were trained concurrently with different words in each mode until correct plural use occurred in the untrained mode for each word. Subsequent training of reversed plural use in comprehension for one subject and production for the other failed to result in reversed plural use in the untrained modes for those words. This mode-independence contrasted with interdependence displayed by normal children in an earlier study using similar procedures. The results are discussed in relation to the normal developmental process and the possible deviation from it.