Martin Fujiki

Social Skills of Children with Specific Language Impairment.

The social skills of 19 elementary school children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 19 chronological age-matched peers were examined. Children in both groups were selected from those chi...

Withdrawn and Sociable Behavior of Children With Language Impairment

This study examined the dimensions of withdrawal and sociability in children with language impairment (LI) and their typically developing chronological age-matched peers. Classroom teachers rated the withdrawn and sociable behaviors of 41 children with LI and 41 typically developing peers using the Teacher Behavioral Rating Scale (TBRS, Hart & Robinson, 1996). Children were sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 years and 10 to 13 years. Subtypes of both withdrawn (solitary-passive withdrawal, solitary-active withdrawal, reticence) and sociable (impulse control/likability, prosocial) behavior were examined. Teachers rated children with LI as displaying higher levels of reticent behavior than typically developing children. Teachers also rated boys with LI as displaying significantly higher levels of solitary-active withdrawal than girls with LI or typically developing children of either gender. The groups did not differ on solitary-passive withdrawal, although boys were rated higher than girls. In the dimension of sociable behavior, children with LI were rated significantly below typical peers on subtypes of impulse control/likability and prosocial behavior. The relationship between language impairment and withdrawn and sociable behavior is complex. Although language impairment is an important factor in social difficulty, the current results suggest that language impairment is not the sole factor leading to social problems in children with LI. Assessment and intervention procedures for children with language and social problems should take the complex nature of this relationship into account.

Language, Social Skills, and Socioemotional Behavior.

This article provides an introduction to the clinical forum on the relationship of language impairment, social skills, and socioemotional behavior. We introduce the following issues: (a) the influe...

Understanding emotions in context: the effects of language impairment on children's ability to infer emotional reactions

BACKGROUND Research indicates children with language impairment (LI) may experience social deficits extending beyond those expected due to their language deficits. In particular, it has been found that children with LI have difficulty with various aspects of emotional competence. One aspect of emotional competence is emotion understanding, which includes the ability to infer the emotions of oneself and others from social context. AIMS To examine the ability of children with LI to infer the emotions elicited by specific social situations. METHODS & PROCEDURES Participants were presented with short scenarios in which the main character, Chris, was exposed to a situation that would be expected to elicit anger, fear, happiness or sadness. Children were then asked to indicate what emotion Chris experienced. Following selected scenarios, children were asked to talk about the emotions they associated with some of the scenarios. They were first asked why the character would feel a particular emotion (e.g. Why did Chris feel happy?) and then asked for a description of how the particular emotion would feel (e.g. How does it feel inside to be happy?). OUTCOMES & RESULTS Both groups of children identified happiness most accurately, followed by sadness, fear and anger. Older children were significantly more accurate than younger children, and typically developing children were significantly more accurate than children with LI. Children with LI were less sophisticated in their descriptions of emotion than were typical children. CONCLUSIONS It is suggested that clinical interventions for children with LI should include activities designed to enrich childrens emotion understanding, giving them opportunities to develop skills they may not acquire otherwise.

Social Interactional Behaviors of Children with Specific Language Impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often encounter social difficulties. This paper provides an overview of recent studies on the social skills of children with SLI followed by a detailed look at six children with SLI. The data reviewed include teacher ratings of social skills and child

Children With Language Impairment in Cooperative Work Groups: A Pilot Study

PURPOSE This pilot study examined the manner in which the individual social-behavioral profiles of children with language impairment (LI) influenced their ability to work within cooperative groups. METHOD Six children with LI each participated in four different cooperative work groups. In each of these groups, the child with LI interacted with two typically developing children (for a total of 48 different typical children). Groups were structured to make it possible for the child with LI to play a meaningful role in the interactions (e.g., assignment of specific roles). The success of each of these interactions was evaluated to determine the extent to which all of the children participated and worked together toward a joint goal. Social profiles of each of the children with LI were obtained using the Teacher Behavioral Rating Scale (TBRS, Hart & Robinson, 1996). The success of the collaborative work of each triad was then considered in light of the childs social profile. RESULTS The success of the individual interactions was highly variable from child to child. However, the social profile of the child with LI appeared to be a good predictor of the childs ability to work with other members of the triad toward a joint goal. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS In facilitating cooperative groups, teachers and speech-language pathologists need to consider the social profiles, as well as the language levels, of children with LI who participate. Children who show withdrawn behaviors may need support to help them become more responsive to their partners. Children with LI who show withdrawn as well as aggressive behaviors may need a variety of accommodations, including specific intervention designed to help them understand the value of working with others.

Ability of children with language impairment to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage

BACKGROUND Several recent studies have indicated that children with language impairment experience difficulty with various aspects of emotion understanding. Because emotion understanding skills are critical to successful social interaction, it is possible that these deficits play a role in the social problems frequently experienced by children with language difficulties. AIMS To explore further the emotion understanding skills of children with language impairment, the investigation examined the ability of these children to understand emotion conveyed by prosody in a narrative passage. METHODS & PROCEDURES Nineteen children with language impairment and their chronological age-matched peers served as participants. Children were sampled from the age range of 8-10; 10 years. These children were presented with a seven-sentence narrative read by actors to express happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. They were then asked to indicate what emotion the speaker expressed. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Children with language impairment performed significantly more poorly than their typical peers in identifying the emotion expressed in the passage. There were also differences between emotions, with happiness being the easiest emotion to identify and fear the most difficult. The interaction between group and emotion type was not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS The results provide additional evidence that children with language impairment may have impairments in emotion understanding. If these findings are replicated, interventions designed to facilitate emotion understanding as an aspect of social communication should be considered for some children with language impairment.

The Ability of Children With Language Impairment to Recognize Emotion Conveyed by Facial Expression and Music

The emotion understanding of children with language impairment (LI) was examined in two studies employing emotion-recognition tasks selected to minimize reliance on language skills. Participants consisted of 43 children with LI and 43 typically developing, age-matched peers, sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 years. In the first study, participants were shown photographs of faces (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) and asked to indicate what emotion was being expressed. In the second study, participants listened to excerpts of classical music and indicated what emotion was being expressed. Children with LI identified the facial expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, and fear with the same accuracy as typical children. They were significantly less accurate than their peers at identifying surprise and disgust. Age differences were observed on anger and surprise, with the younger group performing more poorly than the older group. Children with LI also showed significant differences from typical children in identifying the emotion expressed in music excerpts. Significant differences between the performances of the younger and older groups were also found.

Elementary school age children's comprehension of specific idiomatic expressions

This study explored the ability of elementary school age children to comprehend six idiomatic expressions. Eighty linguistically normal children, 20 from each of four different grade levels (kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade) participated as subjects. All of the children completed a task designed to probe comprehension of specific idioms. A short story was presented, after which the subjects were required to identify events in the story, which were described using idiomatic phrases. When examined as a group, comprehension of the idioms studied improved with increasing age. However, when examined individually, performance was found to be highly variable from idiom to idiom. These results are discussed with regard to clinical implications in the assessment and management of language-disordered children.

Repair of Overlapping Speech in the Conversations of Specifically Language-Impaired and Normally Developing Children.

This study examined the manner in which 10 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and their linguistically normal chronological age (CA) and language age (LA) matched peers repaired overlapping speech. Conversational samples were elicited by an adult examiner from each subject. Instances of overlapping speech were analyzed as being either sentence initial or sentence internal (Gallagher & Craig, 1982). Both types of overlaps were then examined to determine if they required repair, and if so, how they were repaired. It was found that the proportional occurrence of both types of overlap was relatively similar across all three groups. Further, the frequency and nature of repair following sentence initial overlaps was similar across all three groups. However, SLI subjects produced a significantly greater number of unrepaired sentence internal overlaps than did either their CA or LA matched peers.