Kristian Emil Kristoffersen

The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories: reliability, main developmental trends and gender differences

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gestures, comprehension and production of vocabulary, and grammatical complexity increased with age. Moreover, boys lagged behind girls in vocabulary production and comprehension, in grammatical complexity, and in certain types of imitation – this gender difference seems to come out more clearly in this study’s data than in data from other languages.

Semi-spontaneous oral text production: Measurements in clinical practice

Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple measurements for the analysis of semi-spontaneous oral text production by speakers with aphasia. Specifically, the measurements are related to the production of verbs and nouns, and the realization of different sentence types. The proposed measurements should be clinically relevant, easily applicable, and linguistically meaningful. The measurements have been applied to oral descriptions of the ‘Cookie Theft’ picture by eight monolingual Norwegian speakers, four with an anomic type of aphasia and four without any type of language impairment. Despite individual differences in both the clinical and the non-clinical group, most of the measurements seem to distinguish between speakers with and without aphasia.

Sonority and cross‐linguistic acquisition of initial s‐clusters

This paper examines the findings and implications of the cross‐linguistic acquisition of #sC clusters in relation to sonority patterns. Data from individual studies on English, Dutch, Norwegian, and Hebrew are compared for accuracy of production as well as the reductions with respect to potential differences across subtypes of #sC groups. In all four languages, a great deal of variability occurred both within and across children, but a number of general patterns were noted. While all four languages showed similar behaviour in reduction patterns, clear differences between the three Germanic languages–English, Dutch, and Norwegian–and Hebrew were found in the accuracy rate of #sC clusters that have a larger sonority distance between C1 and C2, in a binary split of /s/+[+cont.] versus /s/+[−cont.], and in #sC clusters versus non‐/s/‐clusters. Patterns in cluster reductions were, in general, supportive of the factorial typology of Pater and Barlow, while pointing at some difficulties for the predictions of the headedness approach advanced by Goad and Rose, and Jongstra. This cross‐linguistic description of patterns of s‐clusters increases our knowledge of typical phonological development and helps selecting targets in clinical context.

The acquisition of #sC clusters in Norwegian

This study investigates the acquisition of two-element word-initial consonant clusters in 27 Norwegian children aged 21–36 months. We have focussed on clusters starting with a sibilant (S-clusters), comparing them with clusters without a sibilant (non-S-clusters). Overall, non-S-clusters were mastered more successfully than S-clusters – mainly related to the fact that the younger children (>30 months) performed much better on the non-S-clusters than on the S-clusters – this difference had disappeared in the older age group. Concerning S-clusters, sonority does not seem to play an important role for acquisition neither in terms of the sonority sequencing principle nor sonority distance. Homorganicity may be a factor for a subset of the S-clusters: /sn/ clusters are mastered clearly better than /sm/ clusters. However, frequency may also play a role here. Finally, deletion patterns differ between S-clusters and non-S-clusters: in S-clusters, deletion of the sibilant (C1) is the predominant pattern, while in non-S-clusters, C2 is the one deleted.

Speech and language development in cri du chat syndrome: a critical review.

This article reviews research on speech and language abilities in people with cri du chat syndrome (CCS). CCS is a rare genetic disorder, with an estimated incidence between 1 in 15,000 and 1 in 50,000 births, resulting from a deletion on the short arm of chromosome 5. In general, individuals have delayed speech and language development, and some never develop spoken language. Their receptive language is better than their expressive language, although both are delayed. Regarding phonetics and phonology, substitutions, omissions, and distortions are frequent; consonant inventories are small; syllable shapes are restricted; and vowels are variable and overlap with each other acoustically. Persons with CCS have been found to inflect words from all major word classes. Little is known about syntactic skills, but some individuals are reported to express themselves in utterances of two or more words. Knowledge about speech and language development in CCS is sparse, and the need for more research is considerable.

The use of the Internet in collecting CDI data - an example from Norway

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0.8 and 3.0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and the selection of participants, we discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of using web-based forms as a method of data collection. We found that use of web-based forms was far less time-consuming, and therefore also far less expensive than the traditional paper-based forms. The risk of coding errors was virtually eliminated with this method. We conclude that in a society with high access to the Internet, this is a method well worth pursuing.

Phonological Development in a Child with Cri du Chat Syndrome (CDCS)

Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) is a genetic disorder resulting from loss of genetic material from the short arm of chromosome 5. Symptoms include delayed linguistic development. In my paper I present results from a longitudinal study of a girl with CDCS, focussing on two areas of phonological development, firstly, the development of consonant inventories, and, secondly, the development of syllable structure. It is shown that although her consonant inventory hardly develops over a period of 2 1/2 years, the way she uses her consonants to build syllables and words develops considerably. At 4;6 her syllables are dominantly of the CV-type, and bisyllabic words are mostly reduplications. At 5;9 the picture is very different: She uses a variety of syllable shapes, and there are almost no reduplications left. This development continues from 5;9 to 7;0. On the basis of these results I conclude my paper with some remarks on possible causes of the articulatory problems seen in children with CDCS.

Sign Communication in Cri du Chat Syndrome.

UNLABELLED This paper presents findings from a study on the use of sign supported Norwegian (SSN) in two individuals with Cri du chat syndrome (CCS). The study gives a first account of some selected aspects of production and intelligibility of SSN in CCS. Possible deviance in manual parameters, in particular inter- and/or intra-subject variation in the use of handshape is investigated. Second, the question is addressed to what extent the isolated signs and isolated speech are intelligible and to what extent the combination of signs and speech in SSN contributes to a better intelligibility compared to each part in isolation. Results showed inter-subject variation, as well as individual consistency of deviancy in phonetic handshape parameters. Both participants were slightly more intelligible in their sign articulation when signs and speech production were analyzed separately. Importantly, intelligibility was greatly increased when signs and speech were combined. This emphasizes the importance of SSN for facilitating communication in children with CCS. LEARNING OUTCOMES The reader will be able to identify Signed Supported Communication as an artificial communication form, which can be used as an aid for language development in different groups of children, including children suffering from Cri du chat syndrome. The paper shows the reader to recognize that although children with Cri du chat do not produce words or signs accurately, their intelligibility can improve when they use simultaneous combinations of words and signs.

Development of consonants and vowels in a child with cri du chat syndrome

Language development in persons with cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) has only been described in very general terms. Three tendencies have been noted in the literature: First of all, there is a discrepancy between chronological age and linguistic age in children with CDCS. Second, there is a discrepancy between receptive and expressive linguistic abilities in these children. Third, their articulation is characterized by omissions and substitutions. However, little is known about the exact nature of these articulation problems. In this paper longitudinal phonological data from a Norwegian girl with CDCS are presented and compared to data from normally developing Norwegian-speaking children.

Past tense morphology in Cri du chat syndrome: experimental evidence

It has been observed that persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) have poor language production. However, very few studies have addressed the question whether all aspects of language production are equally afflicted, or whether there are differences between for instance phonological and morphological abilities. The present study was aimed at investigating to what extent persons with CDCS inflect verbs, and, if so, which inflectional patterns in the target language they make use of, and further what kinds of inflectional errors they make. We compared the performance of three subjects (aged 11, 15 and 22) with CDCS on a past tense elicitation task. We found that all three subjects inflected verbs. The number of correct responses, however, varied from 28% to 53%. The majority of errors were over‐generalizations, imitation of input, no response and substitution by semantically related verbs.