Frank Wijnen

Utrecht University | UU · Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS)

Purpose Developmental language disorder (DLD) is characterized by persistent and unexplained difficulties in language development. Accumulating evidence shows that children with DLD also present with deficits in other cognitive domains, such as executive functioning (EF). There is an ongoing debate on whether exclusively verbal EF abilities are imp...

Background and Aim Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are at an increased risk to develop behaviors associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The relationship between early language difficulties and the occurrence of ASD-related behaviors in DLD is poorly understood. One factor that may hinder progress in understanding this r...

Background Executive functioning (EF) is an umbrella term for various cognitive functions that play a role in monitoring and planning to effectuate goal-directed behavior. The 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS), the most common microdeletion syndrome, is associated with a multitude of both somatic and cognitive symptoms, including EF impairments i...

Background Virtually all children with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS) experience language difficulties, next to other physical and psychological problems. However, the grammatical skills of children with 22q11DS are relatively unexplored, particularly in naturalistic settings. The present research filled this gap, including two studies with di...

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7‐month‐old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the sc...

Background: Children with a neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorder often have language difficulties. A large group of children has severely impaired language learning abilities in the absence of a clear cause. These children have developmental language disorder (DLD). Many children with DLD also develop psychiatric symptoms which are associate...

Background: This special issue discusses the roles and functions of language in psychiatric practice from different perspectives. As an introduction, we discuss the phenomenon ‘language’ as an object of scientific investigation. Aim: To give a brief introduction to this theme issue. Method: After a terminological introduction and an outline of...

This workshop summary on natural language processing (NLP) markers for psychosis and other psychiatric disorders presents some of the clinical and research issues that NLP markers might address and some of the activities needed to move in that direction. We propose that the optimal development of NLP markers would occur in the context of research e...

Purpose Young children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) often have impaired language development and poor speech intelligibility. Here, we report a comprehensive overview of standardized language assessment in a relatively large sample of preschool-aged children with 22q11DS. We furthermore explored whether speech ability explained variabil...

Background: Early and effective treatment for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is important. Although a growing body of research shows the effects of interventions at the group level, clinicians observe large individual differences in language growth, and differences in outcomes across language domains. A systematic understandin...

Achtergrond. Taalontwikkelingsstoornis (TOS) wordt gekenmerkt door grote heterogeniteit, maar er is nog weinig bekend over de variatie in specialistische onderwijsondersteuning voor kinderen met TOS. Dit longitudinale onderzoek bestudeerde de taal- en leesvaardigheid van kinderen met TOS bij wie onderwijsondersteuning op 7- of 8-jarige leeftijd beë...

Purpose Children with a developmental language disorder (DLD) are often delayed in their grammatical development. This is suggested to be the most important characteristic and clinical marker of DLD. However, it is unknown if this assumption is valid for young children, in the earliest stages of grammatical development. For this reason, this study...

Schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) are highly heterogeneous in risk factors, symptom characteristics, and disease course outcome. Although speech anomalies have long been recognized as a core symptom of SSD, speech markers are an unexplored source of symptom heterogeneity that may be informative in recognizing relevant subtypes. This study inve...

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus et al. (1999), which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, seven‐month‐old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that...

Background The 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS) is associated with language deficits and weak intellectual functioning. In other clinical groups, linguistic and cognitive difficulties have been associated with impaired acquisition of narrative abilities. However, little is known about the narrative abilities of children with 22q11DS. Aims To de...

The language abilities of young and adult learners range from memorizing specific items to finding statistical regularities between them (item-bound generalization) and generalizing rules to novel instances (category-based generalization). Both external factors, such as input variability, and internal factors, such as cognitive limitations, have be...

Background Clinicians routinely use impressions of speech as an element of mental status examination. In schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, descriptions of speech are used to assess the severity of psychotic symptoms. In the current study, we assessed the diagnostic value of acoustic speech parameters in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, as well as...

Introduction Negative content of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) is a strong predictor of distress and impairment. This paper quantifies emotional voice-content in order to explore both subjective (i.e. perceived) and objectively (i.e. linguistic sentiment) measured negativity and investigates associations with distress. Methods Clinical and...

Deficiencies in discriminating and identifying speech sounds have been widely attested in individuals with dyslexia as well as in young children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia. A speech perception deficit has been hypothesized to be causally related to reading and spelling difficulties. So far, however, early speech perception of FR infants has no...

In this systematic review, we investigate executive functioning (EF) in a selected population: children and adolescents with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS). Studying a selected subset of the population can inform our understanding of typical development by reducing the etiological variability associated with phenotypic expression of EF. In 22q...

Language difficulties of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been associated with multiple underlying factors and are still poorly understood. One way of investigating the mechanisms of DLD language problems is to compare language-related brain activation patterns of children with DLD to those of a population with similar langu...

Several studies have signaled grammatical difficulties in individuals with developmental dyslexia. These difficulties may stem from a phonological deficit, but may alternatively be explained through a domain-general deficit in statistical learning. This study investigates grammar in children with and without dyslexia, and whether phonological memor...

Using an individual differences approach in children with and without dyslexia, this study investigated the hypothesized relationship between statistical learning ability and literacy (reading and spelling) skills. We examined the clinical relevance of statistical learning (serial reaction time and visual statistical learning tasks) by controlling...

Language deviations are a core symptom of schizophrenia. With the advances in computational linguistics, language can be easily assessed in exact and reproducible measures. This study investigated how language characteristics relate to schizophrenia diagnosis, symptom, severity and integrity of the white matter language tracts in patients with schi...

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children’s detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with g...

Language disturbances are key aberrations in schizophrenia. Little is known about the influence of antipsychotic medication on these symptoms. Using computational language methods, this study evaluated the impact of high versus low dopamine D2 receptor (D2R) occupancy antipsychotics on language disturbances in 41 patients with schizophrenia, relati...

Previous research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing cognitive control. Bilinguals’ enhanced cognitive control is thought to be caused by the necessity to exert more language control in bilingual compared to monolingual settings. Surprisingly, between-group research of cognitive effects of bilingualism is har...

Visual statistical learning (VSL) has been proposed to underlie literacy development in typically developing (TD) children. A deficit in VSL may thus contribute to the observed problems with written language in children with dyslexia. Interestingly, although many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) exhibit problems with written lang...

The phenotype of triple X syndrome comprises a variety of physical, psychiatric, and cognitive features. Recent evidence suggests that patients are prone to severe language impairments. However, it remains unclear whether verbal impairments are pervasive at all levels of language, or whether one domain is relatively more spared than others. Here we...

Background Clinicians routinely use impressions of speech as an element of mental status examination, including ‘pressured’ speech in mania and ‘monotone’ or ‘soft’ speech in depression or psychosis. In psychosis in particular, descriptions of speech are used to monitor (negative) symptom severity. Recent advances in computational linguistics have...

Purpose Applying evidence-based grammar intervention can be challenging for speech and language therapists (SLTs). Language in Interaction Therapy (LIT) is a focused stimulation intervention for children with weak morphosyntactic skills, which was developed to support SLTs in incorporating results from effect studies in daily practice. The aims of...

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that offers...

Individual assessment of infants' speech discrimination is of great value for studies of language development that seek to relate early and later skills, as well as for clinical work. The present study explored the applicability of the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007) and the associated statistical analysis approach to assess...

Visual statistical learning (VSL) was traditionally tested through offline two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) questions. More recently, online reaction time (RT) measures and alternative offline question types have been developed to further investigate learning during exposure and more adequately assess individual differences in adults (Siegelma...

Statistical learning (SL) difficulties have been suggested to contribute to the linguistic and non-linguistic problems observed in children with dyslexia. Indeed, studies have demonstrated that children with dyslexia experience problems with SL, but the extent of the problems is unclear. We aimed to examine the performance of children with and with...

Successful language use requires the ability to process nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) that occur in linguistic input. Learning such structural regularities seems therefore crucial for children, and researchers have indeed proposed that language problems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD), especially problems with grammar, are...

While learning language, children unconsciously detect and process structural regularities that reflect (morpho)syntactic rules of language. This mechanism is referred to as statistical learning (SL). A link between SL and children’s knowledge of (morpho)syntactic rules (i.e. grammar) has been proposed. While intuitively such a link may be evident,...

The present study investigated the hypothesized relationship between statistical learning (SL) ability and literacy skills by adopting an individual differences approach in children with and without dyslexia. We analyzed both reading and spelling performance and used two SL measures that have previously been linked to literacy attainment (serial re...

Research on the relationship between language acquisition and Theory of Mind (ToM) has been largely confined to English-speaking populations and has yielded conflicting results regarding which domains of language are most relevant. The current study assessed 101 Dutch-speaking kindergartners on ToM and various potentially relevant domains of langua...

Language intervention has varying results for individual children. Identifying factors that are linked to this variation, is important to adapt interventions to the needs of individual children. We looked at severity and classification of the disorder, multilingualism, and non-verbal intelligence in relation to improvement. From 154 children (4-5...

Background Verbal communication disturbances are a key diagnostic feature of schizophrenia. These disturbances present in different aspects, which can be assessed by looking at form and meaning. However, research on this topic is often confounded by the effects of antipsychotic medication. It therefore remains unclear which aspects of language prod...

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what triggers the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that offe...

Background Studies investigating the underlying mechanisms of hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia suggest that an imbalance in top-down expectations v. bottom-up processing underlies these errors in perception. This study evaluates this hypothesis by testing if individuals drawn from the general population who have had auditory hallucinat...

Nonadjacent dependency learning is thought to be a fundamental skill for syntax acquisition and often assessed via an offline grammaticality judgment measure. Asking judgments of children is problematic, and an offline task is suboptimal as it reflects only the outcome of the learning process, disregarding information on the learning trajectory. Th...

Developmental dyslexia is commonly believed to result from a deficiency in the recognition and processing of speech sounds. According to the cerebellar deficit hypothesis, this phonological deficit is caused by deficient cerebellar function. In the current study, 26 adults with developmental dyslexia and 25 non-dyslexic participants underwent testi...

The ability to track non-adjacent dependencies (the relationship between ai and bi in an aiXbi string) has been hypothesized to support detection of morpho-syntactic dependencies in natural languages (‘The princess is reluctantly kissing the frog’). But tracking such dependencies in natural languages entails being able to generalize dependencies to...

Stimuli for Experiment 2. Acoustic properties of the a/b stimuli. (DOCX)

Data from Experiments 1 and 2 and Inter-rater reliability. Looking times per infant per trial, along with participant information—gender, CDI scores, Total Looking Time at Familiarization for Experiments 1–2, and the inter-rater reliability for a random subsample of each experimental group. (XLSX)

Stimuli for Experiment 1. Acoustic properties of the stimuli used in Experiment 1 compared to Kerkhoff et al. (2013); X elements were also used in Experiment 2. (DOCX)

Protocol. The experimental protocol for Experiments 1 and 2. (DOC)

Learning and processing natural language requires the ability to track syntactic relationships between words and phrases in a sentence, which are often separated by intervening material. These nonadjacent dependencies can be studied using artificial grammar learning paradigms and structured sequence processing tasks. These approaches have been used...

In this poster we assessed discrimination performance of 6-10-month-old infants (n = 117), on a salient Dutch vowel contrast (/a:/-/e:/), at the individual level using Bayesian statistics.

Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same...

In this poster, we compared the performance of 50 children with dyslexia (26 girls, 24 boys, aged 8;4 - 11;2) with 50 age- and gender-matched children without dyslexia on three distinct tasks that assessed their statistical learning abilities: a serial reaction time, visual statistical learning and auditory nonadjacent dependency learning task.

Several studies have shown that language therapy can be effective in children with DLD (Law et al, 2004, Broomfield & Dodd, 2011). However, not every child shows improvement and little is known about child characteristics related to progress. Understanding of these factors is important to adapt services to the needs of an individual child. In this...

Verbal communication disorders are a hallmark of many neurological and psychiatric illnesses. Recent developments in computational analysis provide objective characterizations of these language abnormalities. We conducted a meta-analysis assessing semantic space models as a diagnostic or prognostic tool in psychiatric or neurological disorders. Dia...

Language experience shapes musical and speech pitch processing. We investigated whether speaking a lexical tone language natively modulates neural processing of pitch in language and music as well as their correlation. We tested tone language (Mandarin Chinese), and non-tone language (Dutch) listeners in a passive oddball paradigm measuring mismatc...

Purpose: The current meta-analysis provides a quantitative overview of published and unpublished studies on statistical learning in the auditory verbal domain in people with and without specific language impairment (SLI). The database used for the meta-analysis is accessible online and open to updates (Community-Augmented Meta-Analysis), which fac...

Background: Literacy impairments in dyslexia have been hypothesized to be (partly) due to an implicit learning deficit. However, studies of implicit visual artificial grammar learning (AGL) have often yielded null results. Aims: The aim of this study is to weigh the evidence collected thus far by performing a meta-analysis of studies on implicit...

This poster describes preliminary results on novel online measures of nonadjacent dependency learning in children with and without specific language acquisition. Data collection is still ongoing.

Background: The language profiles of children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children can show partial, and possibly temporary, overlap. The current study examined the persistence of this overlap over time. Furthermore, we aimed to better understand why the language profiles of these two groups show resemblance, testing the hypothesis...

Prepositions are important function words in everyday communication and serve a number of semantic and syntactic functions. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are expected to have problems with prepositions as they are known to have considerable difficulty in acquiring function morphemes (Leonard, 1989). Surprisingly preposition use i...

Purpose: Grammatical morphology is often a locus of difficulty for both children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children. In contrast to previous research that mainly focused on verbal tense and agreement markings, the present study investigated whether plural and past participle formation can disentangle the effects of LI and bilingu...

Visual statistical learning (VSL) is usually tested through offline two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) questions, which has yielded mixed results in children. We assessed children’s VSL using an online reaction time (RT) measure and two distinct offline question types to investigate whether these methods can track learning over time and outcome...

Results of our pilot with 46 Typically developing children showing that reaction times can be used as measure of online nonadjacent dependency learning