John M. Panagos

Syntax influences the accuracy of consonant production in language-disordered children.

Nine children with restricted syntactic and phonological development repeated 20 target consonants embbedded in noun phrase, simple declarative, and passive structures to determine the influence of syntactic complexity on accuracy of consonant production. The children made significantly more errors in the sentence contexts than in the noun phrase context. This was found for both early-developing and late-developing consonants. However, the ratio of the number of distinctive feature modifications to the number of consonant errors showed that segmental errors were not produced as less exact approximations of the target consonants. Instead, the children simply made more errors of a predictable type, suggesting that the effect of syntax on accuracy of consonant production is quantitative rather than qualitative.

String Complexity Increases Phonemic Interference

3 groups of monolingual adult native speakers of English attempted to pronounce a non-English phone embedded in 1-, 4-, and 7-syllable phonological strings. The number of phonemic errors made increased with syllable complexity, with 1-syllable Ss showing quick sound recognition, native phoneme inhibition, and phonetic approximations of the target sound. String complexity causes selective attention to shift away from the phonetic detail of the stimulus to a phrasal level of analysis.

Repetition of Comprehensible Sentences by Children with Deviant Speech

Recently the imitation of sentence strings has been found useful in probing the linguistic abilities of language disordered and normal children. The impetus for this method was provided by Chomsky (1964), who regarded repetition performance as one indirect way of tapping linguistic competence for the syntactic, semantic and phonological rules of grammar. The technique he suggested was to have the child repeat “sentences and nonsentences, phonologically possible sequences and phonologically impossible ones” for the analysis and interpretation of error patterns across levels of the grammar. Correct placement of elements would suggest acquired competence, while misplacement would indicate lapses in performance, or nonacquisition of linguistic competence. In this manner, Chomsky speculated, it might be possible to determine whether fully developed conceptions of sentence structure exist under the telegraphic speech patterns so commonly observed in young children. Subsequent repetition studies on the whole hav...

Developmental transformational capacity of children with Down's syndrome.

This study examined the generative-transformational capacities of two groups of children with Downs Syndrome with mean mental ages of 3,6 yr. and 4,6 yr. respectively. A sentence repetition task was used to assess their knowledge of selected transformational sentence types (simple-active-affirmative-declarative, question, negative, passive and negative-passive). There were significant effects of groups and sentence types but a nonsignificant interaction of groups × sentence types. These results were taken as support for Lennebergs “slow motion” hypothesis of language development in mentally retarded children. Children with Downs Syndrome appear to follow the same patterns of grammatical acquisition as normal children but at a reduced rate associated with the severity of their retardation.

Role saliency cues and children's sentence comprehension

Forty-eight children at four age levels (3, 4, 5, and 7 years) acted out active and passive sentences immediately after exposure to matching information, mismatching information, and no-information cues. The matching information cues yielded the highest comprehension scores, followed in order by the no-information and the mismatching information cues. Active sentences were easier to comprehend than passive sentences, and comprehension scores improved with age. Processing context information in the form of role saliency cues is a component of childrens language comprehension and development. It was found that context is used differentially depending on age and linguistic knowledge. The results indicated that the analysis of childrens comprehension skills is a multifaceted process not solely dependent upon syntactic processing.

Mimicry versus imitative modeling: Facilitating sentence production in the speech of the retarded

Two methods of language instruction administered to mentally retarded subjects at the two-word stage of language development were investigated. Subjects of the mimicry training group imitated Agent-Action-Object (AAO) constructions immediately after presentation, while subjects of the imitative modeling group first heard the AAO presentation and later produced the AAO construction in response to a verb question. Imitative modeling subjects achieved as many correct AAO responses during training and more correct responses on a generalization task and in a free play setting. They also displayed more novel response behavior (selective imitations) and spontaneously corrected productions. The results support the use of modeling procedures for inducing language production in the retarded.

In search of a language intervention lexicon

An analysis of the syntactic, semantic and phonological features of a corpus of therapy words drawn form recent publications dealing with remedial language instruction was performed to determine whether these words would in theory support full grammatical acquisition. Percentage of occurrence data were compared with distributional statiscs for adult (Berger, 1967a) and child (Weir, 1962) usage. The results suggested a bias in favor of concrete words referring to everyday objects around the home, nouns, verbs and adjectives, and morphemes of simple syllable and sound structure. In general the words analyzed appeared more suitable for children under 3 years of age than for older children. Of factors guiding the clinicians selection of therapy words, native speaker intuition for distributional characteristics of the language was regarded as the major factor of judgment.

Mothers' and non-mothers' semantic adaptation to deviant speech.

This study examined whether a group of mothers of children with deviant speech, and a group of non-mothers, could adapt their comprehension strategies to decode command sentences spoken by a child known to generate patterned deviant utterances. While subjects made significant improvement in their comprehension performance (adaptation), a significant difference between groups was not observed. Perceptual adaptation to variant linguistic codes may be so basic to decoding performance that maternal experience with child speech would not provide mothers with a decoding advantage over native speakers engaged in everyday adaptive communication.