Karla K. McGregor

On the relation between mental representation and naming in a child with specific language impairment

The naming and drawing responses of a child with specific language impairment (age 5.5 years) were used to test the hypothesis that deficient storage in the mental lexicon plays a role in the naming problems associated with SLI. In confrontation- and repeated naming, the child demonstrated frequent semantic substitutions and occasional phonologic substitutions. Stochastic modelling of his repeated naming revealed storage deficits to be a source of these errors. Comparative picture naming, picture drawing allowed exploration of this storage deficit and revealed that, for some semantic naming errors, sparse semantic representations were clearly at fault but for others, sparse phonological input and output representations played a role. Phonological naming errors, in contrast, were typically associated with strong semantic representations. Clinical, theoretical, and methodological contributions of this cognitive neuropsychological case study are discussed.

Subject Pronoun and Article Omissions in the Speech of Children With Specific Language Impairment: A Phonological Interpretation

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their MLU-matched normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns he and you, and the article the in subject phrases. Although all of these word types were phonological phrase-initial syllables, the proper nouns received strong stress, but the function words received weak stress. Both groups of children showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. There was no significant difference amongst the imitations of the two pronouns or the article; all were omitted frequently by both groups. This suggests that the status of subject articles and pronouns as weak syllables in the initial position of phonological phrases may in some cases constitute a more important factor than the distinctive grammatical roles they play. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omissions is explored.

An Overview of Prosody and Its Role in Normal and Disordered Child Language

This tutorial presents an overview of prosody and its application to specific language impairment. First, prosody is defined as both a phonological and acoustic phenomenon. Prosody is further explo...

Socio-Pragmatics and Attention: Contributions to Gesturally Guided Word Learning in Toddlers

It is clear that gestural cues facilitate early word learning. In hopes of illuminating the relative contributions of attentional and socio-pragmatic factors to the mechanisms by which these cues exert their influence, we taught toddlers novel words with the support of a hierarchy of gestural cues. Twenty-eight- to 31-month-olds heard one of two possible referents labeled with a novel word, while the experimenter gazed at or gazed at and pointed to, touched, or manipulated the target. Learning improved with greater redundancy among cues, with the largest improvement evident when pointing was added to gazing. Looking times revealed that attentional factors accounted for only a small fraction of the variance in performance. Indeed, a significant increase in attention driven by manipulation of the target failed to improve learning. The results therefore suggest a strong role for socio-pragmatic factors in supporting the facilitative effect of gestural cues on word learning.

Associations between syntax and the lexicon among children with or without ASD and language impairment.

Five groups of children defined by presence or absence of syntactic deficits and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) took vocabulary tests and provided sentences, definitions, and word associations. Children with ASD who were free of syntactic deficits demonstrated age-appropriate word knowledge. Children with ASD plus concomitant syntactic language impairments (ASDLI) performed similarly to peers with specific language impairment (SLI) and both demonstrated sparse lexicons characterized by partial word knowledge and immature knowledge of word-to-word relationships. This behavioral overlap speaks to the robustness of the syntax–lexicon interface and points to a similarity in the ASDLI and SLI phenotypes.

The Development and Enhancement of Narrative Skills in a Preschool Classroom: Towards a Solution to Clinician-Client Mismatch

Three studies focused on the development and enhancement of narrative skills within a preschool classroom. The purpose of Study 1 was to collect local norms on narrative development. Fifty-two pres...

Gesture as a support for word learning: the case of under.

ABSTRACTForty children, aged 1 ; 8-2 ; 0, participated in one of three training conditions meant to enhance their comprehension of the spatial term under: the +Gesture group viewed a symbolic gesture for under during training; those in the +Photo group viewed a still photograph of objects in the under relationship; those in the Model Only group did not receive supplemental symbolic support. Childrens knowledge of under was measured before, immediately after, and two to three days after training. A gesture advantage was revealed when the gains exhibited by the groups on untrained materials (but not trained materials) were compared at delayed post-test (but not immediate post-test). Gestured input promoted more robust knowledge of the meaning of under, knowledge that was less tied to contextual familiarity and more prone to consolidation. Gestured input likely reduced cognitive load while emphasizing both the location and the movement relevant to the meaning of under.

Why Word Learning is not Fast.

Upon fast mapping, children rarely retain new words even over intervals as short as 5 min. In this study, we asked whether the memory process of encoding or consolidation is the bottleneck to retention. Forty-nine children, mean age 33 months, were exposed to eight 2- or-3-syllable nonce neighbors of words in their existing lexicons. Didactic training consisted of six exposures to each word in the context of its referent, an unfamiliar toy. Productions were elicited four times: immediately following the examiner’s model, and at 1-min-, 5-min-, and multiday retention intervals. At the final two intervals, the examiner said the first syllable and provided a beat gesture highlighting target word length in syllables as a cue following any erred production. The children were highly accurate at immediate posttest. Accuracy fell sharply over the 1-min retention interval and again after an additional 5 min. Performance then stabilized such that the 5-min and multiday posttests yielded comparable performance. Given this time course, we conclude that it was not the post-encoding process of consolidation but the process of encoding itself that presented the primary bottleneck to retention. Patterns of errors and responses to cueing upon error suggested that word forms were particularly vulnerable to partial decay during the time course of encoding.

The Use of Contrastive Analysis in Distinguishing Difference From DisorderA Tutorial

Contrastive analysis aids the identification of true speech-language errors in cases where there is a mismatch between the linguistic communities of the clinician and the client. This tutorial illu...

Follow-up study of a right- and a left-hemispherectomized child : Implications for localization and impairment of language in children

Two hemispherectomized girls, one operated on the right, the other on the left, were followed from time of surgery until 9 and 10 years of age and compared with respect to course of language acquisition following surgery. At conclusion of follow-up, receptive and expressive language, phoneme perception and production, and sentence processing of the two hemispherectomized children were compared with those of two control groups of similar age, one developing language normally, the other language-impaired. The left-hemispherectomized childs abilities were similar to those of the language-impaired children; the right-hemispherectomized childs abilities resembled those of the language-normal children. Implications for localization of developmental anomalies in language-impaired children are discussed.