Kamila Polišenská

Sentence Repetition: What Does the Task Measure?.

BACKGROUND Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about childrens sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. AIMS (1) To evaluate the effects of different types of long-term linguistic knowledge on immediate recall, (2) to assess age sensitivity of repetition tasks designed to evaluate these effects, and (3) to establish if the effects are similar across typologically different languages. The study also considers the implications of the findings for the use of sentence repetition as a research and clinical assessment tool. METHODS & PROCEDURES Participants were 50 English-speaking and 50 Czech-speaking typically developing 4-5-year-olds. Childrens ability to recall sequences of items was compared in seven linguistic conditions ranging from fully well-formed sentences to sequences of non-words. In each condition, children repeated blocks of successively longer stimuli to establish their span. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Results showed significant but differential effects of all linguistic factors in both languages. While syntactic violations and presence of non-words dramatically reduced childrens span, semantic implausibility and the removal of sentence prosody played a significant but much smaller role. Familiarity of function words was more important than familiarity of content words. The effects of different linguistic factors on spans were the same for both languages and did not change between 4 and 5 years, although average spans increased over this age range. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Childrens ability to repeat sentences is more dependent on their familiarity with morphosyntax and lexical phonology than semantics or prosody, with function words of particular importance. Findings have implications for the use of recall in clinical assessment and as a research tool.

Language profiles in children with Down Syndrome and children with Language Impairment: Implications for early intervention

This study investigated early language profiles in two groups of children with developmental disability: children with Down Syndrome (DS, n=13) and children with Language Impairment (LI, n=16). Vocabulary and grammatical skills in the two groups were assessed and compared to language skills of typically developing (TD) children matched on size of either their receptive or expressive vocabulary (n=58). The study aimed to establish if language development in these groups is delayed or fundamentally different than the TD groups, and if the group with DS showed a similar language profile to the group with LI. There is a clinical motivation to identify possible key risk characteristics that may distinguish children who are likely to have LI from the variation observed in TD children. Three clear findings emerged from the data. Firstly, both receptive and expressive vocabulary compositions did not significantly differ in the clinical groups (DS and LI) after being matched to the vocabulary size of TD children. This provides further support for the idea that word learning for the children in the clinical groups is delayed rather than deviant. Secondly, children with LI showed a significantly larger gap between expressive and receptive word knowledge, but children with DS showed a pattern comparable to TD children. Thirdly, children with LI who understood a similar number of words as the TD children still had significantly poorer grammatical skills, further underlining the dissociation between lexical and grammatical skills in children with LI. Grammatical skills of children with DS were commensurate with their lexical skills. The findings suggest that language intervention should be specifically tailored to etiology rather than focused on general communication strategies, particularly in children with LI.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters’ social or language status, but not with the raters’ age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

Narrative abilities in early successive bilingual Slovak–English children: A cross-language comparison

This study investigates macrostructure skill transfer in successive bilingual children speaking Slovak and English, a new language combination for narrative research. We examined whether narrative performance reflected language dominance and assessed relationships between nonword repetition (NWR) and narrative skills within and across languages. Forty typically developing Slovak–English bilingual children (mean age = 5 years, 10 months) were evaluated for microstructure and macrostructure performance in both languages through story telling and retelling tasks. In addition, NWR was assessed in Slovak, the childrens first language (L1). Macrostructure scores were higher in their L1 than in their second language (L2), but comprehension did not differ across languages. L1 NWR was significantly related to L1 microstructure scores, but not to L1/L2 macrostructure or L2 microstructure. Implications for assessing bilingual childrens language are discussed.

A Framework for Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition Tests: Effects of Bilingualism and Socioeconomic Status on Children's Performance

Purpose As a recognized indicator of language impairment, nonword repetition has unique potential for distinguishing language impairment from difficulties due to limited experience and knowledge of a language. This study focused on a new Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition framework, comprising 3 tests that vary the phonological characteristics of nonwords, in the quest for an assessment that minimizes effects of language experience and knowledge and thereby maximizes potential for assessing children with diverse linguistic experience. Method The English version of the new framework was administered, with a test of receptive vocabulary, to 4- to 7-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with typical development (n = 21 per group) from neighborhoods with midhigh and low socioeconomic status (SES). Results Receptive vocabulary was affected by both bilingualism and neighborhood SES. In contrast, no effects of bilingualism or neighborhood SES were found on 2 of our nonword repetition tests, whereas the most language-specific test yielded a borderline effect of neighborhood SES but no effect of bilingualism. Conclusions The findings support the potential of the new tests for assessing children regardless of lingual or socioeconomic background. They also highlight the importance of considering the characteristics of nonword targets and investigating the compound influence of bilingualism and SES on different language assessments.

The role of pictures and gestures as a support mechanism for novel word learning A training study with 2-year-old children

A training study examined novel word learning in 2-year-old children and assessed two nonverbal mechanisms, pictures and gestures, which are commonly used as communication support. The aim was to (1) compare these two support mechanisms and measure their effects on expressive word learning and (2) to investigate these effects on word production over an extended time period. At baseline, the children’s performance was assessed on vocabulary and grammatical skills, and the groups were matched on these key variables. Eighteen participants were taught novel words either accompanied by a gesture or by a picture. The training consisted of four 20-minute sessions per week over a period of four weeks. Following training, the children were assessed on their ability to produce novel words at three time points: immediately after training, at a 2-week follow-up and at a 6-week follow-up. Gesture training supported word learning significantly better than picture training across all three testing points. Children in both groups showed the best production immediately after training, with a small but nonsignificant decline at 2-week follow-up. There was a significant decline in time 3 compared to time 1, but the children were still able to produce 6.8 out of 10 novel words, suggesting long-term learning. Our findings suggest that gesture may be used to support word learning and could benefit children with late emerging language. The importance of these findings for language development and language intervention are discussed.