Jennifer Windsor

Effect of Foster Care on Young Children's Language Learning.

This report examines 174 young childrens language outcomes in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, the first randomized trial of foster placement after institutional care. Age of foster placement was highly correlated with language outcomes. Placement by 15 months led to similar expressive and receptive language test scores as typical age peers at 30 and 42 months. Placement from 15 to 24 months also led to dramatic language improvement. In contrast, children placed after 24 months had the same severe language delays as children in institutional care. Language samples at 42 months confirmed that placement after 24 months led to lower expressive skill.

Performance on Nonlinguistic Visual Tasks by Children with Language Impairment.

The performance of 8- to 13-year-old monolingual English-speaking children with language impairment (LI) on seven nonlinguistic tasks was compared with two groups of typically developing children, monolingual English-speaking children, and proficient Spanish–English sequential bilingual children. Group differences were apparent, with a key finding that the LI group was observably slower than both typical groups in mental rotation and arithmetic, and also slower than the typical monolingual group in odd man out, pattern matching, and form completion. Overall, the response time (RT) increased equivalently across groups as task difficulty increased. Chronological age and perceptual–motor speed contributed to task performance, especially for the shorter tasks. RT trajectories across the 6-year age span showed that task RT decreased with age, but with greater variability for longer tasks that may also be more vulnerable to the effect of experience.

Crossing borders: Recognition of Spanish words by English-speaking children with and without language impairment

We introduce an objective method for classifying phonological overlap between Spanish and English translation equivalents. This method then is exploited to examine spoken word recognition using stimuli with graded levels of phonological overlap. Performance by typical English-only speaking (EO) children and English-only children with primary language impairment (LI) is compared to a control group of bilingual Spanish–English peers (BI). Response time and accuracy separated groups, with the BI group outperforming the EO group, who in turn outperformed the LI group. Children with more severe LI are slower than those with mild LI, and LI severity is significantly correlated with speed. The two groups of monolingual children and the LI subgroups respond in a qualitatively similar way to decreasing phonological overlap.

Counting Span and the Identification of Primary Language Impairment

BACKGROUND In recent research, verbal working memory has been proposed as a primary area of deficit for children with language impairment (LI), and therefore a source of more sensitive assessment measures. In addition, research on non-linguistic tasks has suggested that children with LI may have deficits that extend beyond the linguistic domain. These dual lines of research can be connected to the drive for non-biased assessment tasks for children with diverse language learning experiences (such as bilingual children), because linguistic tasks may be intrinsically biased against such children. AIMS To investigate the usefulness of a working-memory task with a minimal linguistic load as a potential screening tool for children with primary LI. METHODS & PROCEDURES Three groups of children aged 7;10-13;11 participated in the study: monolingual English-speaking children with LI, typical monolingual English-speaking children, and typical Spanish-English bilingual children with several years of English experience. Performance of the three groups on the Counting Span task was explored through group comparisons and likelihood ratios. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Children with LI had significantly lower Counting Span Set score accuracy than either typical group, with the monolingual and bilingual groups showing equivalent task performance. However, results from likelihood ratios showed that Counting Span accuracy did not have compelling diagnostic power when the entire age group was considered. Children with less than 67% accuracy were only three times more likely to be from the LI group than from either of the two typical groups. In addition to language status (typical or LI), chronological age was a key contributor to Counting Span performance in this age group. Likelihood ratios for children aged 10;0 and above showed that children with less than 67% accuracy were nine times more likely to come from the LI group than the typical groups. CONCLUSIONS This intermediate diagnostic ability suggests that performance on the Counting Span alone is insufficient to identify LI among linguistically diverse learners. However, Counting Span may be a very useful component of a larger LI assessment battery, particularly for children over the age of 10;0.

The Functions of Novel Word Compounds.

The traditional assumptions that novel word compounds fill lexical gaps and allow speakers to convey an intended meaning more precisely were explored. Examples from spontaneous language demonstrated that some novel compounds occur in the absence of a lexical gap and that not all compounds serve a communicative function. The relation between communicative demands and novel noun-noun compound use was explored experimentally also. Twenty-eight five-year-old children and 16 adults participated in referential and non-referential communication tasks in which they were exposed to referents whose elements were inherently and non-inherently related. Both children and adults produced more compounds for inherent than for non-inherent referents. However, although the children demonstrated that they were sensitive to the need for greater communicative precision in the referential compared to the non-referential task, there was no difference in frequency of compound use across tasks. These results suggest that the functions ascribed to novel compounds warrant closer scrutiny.

Effect of foster care on language learning at eight years: Findings from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project

This study reports on language outcomes at eight years from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled study of foster care. We previously have shown that children placed in foster care by age two have substantially stronger preschool language outcomes than children placed later and children remaining in institutional care. One hundred and five children participated in the current study, fifty-four originally assigned to foster care and fifty-one to continued institutional care. Even though current placements varied, children originally in foster care had longer sentences and stronger sentence repetition and written word identification. Children placed in foster care by age two had significant advantages in word identification and nonword repetition; children placed by age 1 ; 3 performed equivalently to community peers. The results show the continuing adverse effects of early poor institutional care on later language development and the key importance of age of placement in a more optimal environment.

Effect of semantic inconsistency on sentence grammaticality judgements for children with and without language-learning disabilities

The effect of semantic inconsistency on performance of an auditory sentence grammaticality judgement task was investigated with 69 school-age children with and without language-learning disabilities (LD). Children judged the grammatical correctness of semantically consistent sentences; for example, She had lovely catlike eyes and *The catlike wouldn’t stop purring (where * indicates an ungrammatical sentence). They also judged the correctness of semantically inconsistent sentences; for example, The catlike corn wasn’t picked and *They flew through the catlike. Children with and without LD showed high accuracy in correctly identifying grammatically correct sentences that were semantically consistent, but showed substantially lower accuracy in identifying sentences as grammatical when they were semantically inconsistent. Although semantic inconsistency affected identification of ungrammatical sentences for each group, the effect was significantly greater for LD children than for their typically-developing (TD) peers. In identifying both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, the LD children’s performance was similar to a group of younger, typically-developing children with comparable language skills (i.e., children matched for raw score on a test of language abilities). The finding that children’s task performance can be affected by competing linguistic demands within the task is interpreted within a limited capacity, interactionist perspective of language impairment.

Backward masking for speech and tones

The purpose of this research was to determine if listeners who have difficulty with backward masking for tones in noise will also have difficulty recognizing speech sounds in noise that is presented in a backward‐masking paradigm. To achieve this goal, backward masking for tones (1.0 kHz) and for speech (vowel‐constant syllables) was measured in a sample of children and adults. Participants included four adults, and five children ranging in age from 8 to 13 years. Results show a significant correlation between tonal thresholds and speech recognition performance in the presence of a backward masker. There was large individual variability, with some of this variance accounted for by age. [Work supported by Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program, University of Minnesota.]

Relationships between acoustic and perceptual measures of stress in nonwords produced by children with developmental apraxia of speech and children with phonological disorders

This study investigated relationships between acoustic measures of stress in nonwords produced by children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (sDAS) and children with phonological disorders (PD), and perceptual judgments made by trained listeners. Five children with sDAS and five children with PD produced multiple tokens of eight disyllabic nonwords with iambic and trochaic stress patterns. Measures of vowel duration, f0, and intensity were made. Children from both groups produced acoustic differences between stressed and stressless syllables. In a perception experiment, 10 listeners judged whether tokens were produced with stress on the initial or final syllable. Listeners judged that children with sDAS accurately matched target stress contours less often than children with PD. The proportion of listeners judging that a word was produced with final syllable stress was used as the dependant variable in a regression, in which the ratio of vowel duration, f0, and intensity between the two syllab...

Maternal Wait Time after Questions for Children with and without Down Syndrome.

Maternal wait time after open- and closed-ended questions provided during conversation to eight children with Down syndrome (DS) and eight language-age (LA) matched peers was investigated. Analysis of wait time after questions that children did not answer indicated that a longer wait time was provided for LA children (M = 2.5 seconds) than for DS children (M = 1.8 seconds). These wait times were matched well with the childrens response times when they did answer questions; LA children taking a mean of 1.9 seconds and DS children a mean of 1.0 seconds to respond. Unlike DS children, LA children took significantly longer to respond when their answers were not topic-related to the maternal question. For both groups, there was no difference in wait times after closed- and open-ended questions and no difference for questions for which joint attention was and was not established.