Llorenç Andreu

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC · NeuroDevelop eHealth Lab - eHealth Center (UOC)

Background and rationale. Different lexical processing theories assume that the recognition of a word leads to the automatic activation of a range of syntactic and semantic knowledge that are relevant to the interpretation of language. In this respect, the verb is a key word in language processing and in verbal representation. The activation of a v...

A critical problem for Catalan-Spanish bilinguals is the lack of assessment tools to conduct valid and accurate oral language evaluations. The purpose of this preliminary study was to provide pilot data for a new potential assessment tool in Catalan. We examined the possibility that two novel tasks, a grammatical correction (GramCorr) and morpholog...

Introduction Numerous studies have shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD), in addition to oral language difficulties, exhibit impaired writing abilities. Their texts contain problems in grammar, organization, cohesion, and length of written output. However, most of these studies have been conducted with English speakers. Eng...

A. Auza, C. Rojas, G. Simon-Cereijido et al. Methods and results: Dr Jackson-Maldonado's studies on language acquisition included groups of premature babies, late talkers, and typical development children in bilingual and diverse socioeconomic conditions. Moreover, she studied atypical language development in children with hearing loss, children wi...

E l trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL) es una alteración severa y persistente que afecta al desarrollo del lenguaje oral sin la presencia de otro trastorno que cause esa alteración y que tiene importantes implicaciones en el desarrollo personal, social y escolar. Este manual tiene el objetivo principal de aportar los avances más relevantes...

Purpose Previous studies have raised the possibility of preserved language comprehension in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in online tasks and within simple sentence structures. Consequently, we evaluated the capacity of children with DLD to comprehend verbal number agreement in simple sentence structures (i.e., verb–object–sub...

The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish-and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (M age 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (M age 7.8), 24 children with the...

El trastorno específico del lenguaje (TEL) es un trastorno del lenguaje oral con desarrollo en etapa infantil que afecta a la expresión y la comprensión. En el ámbito angloparlante, fruto de dos estudios con la metodología Delphi (Bishop et al., 2016; 2017) se ha generalizado, tanto en el ámbito clínico y educativo como en las publicaciones científ...

En aquest manual presentem una eina d’avaluació fàcil i útil per als professionals del desenvolupament infantil. Els inventaris del desenvolupament comunicatiu i lingüístic MacArthur-Bates, a partir de les observacions de les mares i els pares, descriuen, situen i permeten seguir l’adquisició de les competències comunicatives i lingüístiques dels i...

A comprehensive approach, including social and emotional affectations, has been recently proposed as an important framework to understand Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). There is an increasing considerable interest in knowing how language and emotion are related, and as far as we know, the role of the emotional regulation (ER) of parents of...

El Trastorno del desarrollo del Lenguaje (TDL) es un trastorno en la adquisición y el desarrollo del lenguaje oral que tiene también repercusiones en el desarrollo socio-emocional del niño y en su rendimiento escolar.

Background: A growing body of work shows that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) perform poorly on statistical word learning (SWL) tasks, consistent with the predictions of the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis that predicts that procedural memory is impaired in DLD. To date, however, SWL performance has not been compared across lingu...

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) need more exposures to learn new words in an unambiguous context compared to children with typical development (TD). However, it remains unclear whether they would be able to learn new words by extracting frequencies over multiple word-object encounters in ambiguous situations. The present study e...

El Trastorno Específico del Lenguaje (TEL) es un trastorno del neurodesarrollo que afecta aproximadamente a un 7% de la población y que compromete a la expresión y/o comprensión del lenguaje oral. Sin embargo, es un trastorno muy desconocido para la población general. Uno de los factores que lo explican es la gran dispersión terminológica que difer...

Here, we studied the beginnings of language development, jointly assessing two groups of precursors, sociodemographic and pre-linguistic, that have previously been studied separately. Thus, the general objective of this study was to explore which factors best explained the acquisition of initial expressive vocabulary. The sample consisted of 504 pa...

Nonword repetition has been proposed as a diagnostic marker of developmental language disorder (DLD); however, the inconsistency in the ability of nonword repetition tasks (NRT) to identify children with DLD raises significant questions regarding its feasibility as a clinical tool. Research suggests that some of the inconsistency across NRT may be...

Resumen Introducción Los niños y niñas con trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL) además de las dificultades del lenguaje, también pueden tener afectados otros aspectos cognitivos como la atención y la memoria. Los estudios de estos aspectos supralingüísticos han abierto un debate en la comunidad científica y profesional para cambiar la denom...

Resumen Antecedentes y objetivo Cada vez hay más investigaciones que tratan de encontrar posibles identificadores tempranos de las dificultades del lenguaje. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los antecedentes familiares de trastornos del lenguaje u otros trastornos del neurodesarrollo, los factores sociodemográficos y otros indicadores de d...

Resumen Antecedentes y objetivo El objetivo de este estudio es analizar, a nivel expresivo y receptivo, las dificultades morfosintácticas en niños y niñas con trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL) a través de tres subpruebas del CELF-4: estructura de palabras, estructura de oraciones y formulación de oraciones. Método Participaron 25 niños/...

Resumen Antecedentes y objetivo El presente estudio analiza la relación entre el trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL) y la presencia de síntomas emocionales o problemas con los compañeros/as. Concretamente, se estudia el riesgo de sufrir victimización en la población con TDL, y su relación con los problemas del lenguaje. Método La investig...

Background Function words, and more specifically prepositions and prepositional locutions, are considered to be one of the most important difficulties for children with DLD. Aims To examine the capacity of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to comprehend different Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in a sim...

El trastorn del desenvolupament del llenguatge (TDL) es defineix com una afectació en l’adquisició i en el desenvolupament del llenguatge oral. Per poder adquirir adequadament el llenguatge oral, els infants han d’integrar la informació multimodal de la parla (auditiva i visual). Diferents estudis indiquen que aquests infants podrien presentar un d...

Function words and, more specifically, articles have been widely indicated as one of the main sources of difficulty for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study is the first to assess the online comprehension of Spanish articles in bilingual children with DLD. In an eye tracking experiment, we monitored participants’ e...

El trastorn del desenvolupament del llenguatge o TDL és un trastorn caracteritzat per una dificultat severa i persistent en l’expressió i la comprensió del llenguatge que afecta aproximadament un 7% de la població infantil. Tot i ser un trastorn molt prevalent, encara no en sabem la causa. Al llarg dels anys i amb les investigacions fetes per inten...

Verbs play an essential role in enabling sentences to be interpreted rapidly in real time. The objective of this work is to investigate how verb information is used during real-time comprehension of sentences in Spanish. Twenty-five children (aged 5.3–8.2 years) with specific language impairment (SLI), fifty typically developing children (aged 3.3–...

La escuela es el espacio por excelencia donde el niño desarrolla la capacidad de expresión y de comprensión oral y escrita. Este libro recoge cómo se debe enfocar el trabajo para abordar la enseñanza del lenguaje en la escuela. Su estructura se ha organizado en torno a las tres formas de expresión lingüística que se trabajan en las aulas: la lengua...

It has been demonstrated that children with specific language impairment (SLI) show difficulties not only with auditory but also with audiovisual speech perception. The goal of this study was to assess whether children with SLI might show reduced attention to the talker's mouth compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. An additional aim wa...

Word recognition includes the activation of a range of syntactic and semantic knowledge that is relevant to language interpretation and reference. Here we explored whether or not the number of arguments a verb takes impinges negatively on verb processing time. In this study, three experiments compared the dynamics of spoken word recognition for ver...

Eye tracking data from the 3 experiments. (XLSX)

List of verbs used as stimuli for experiment 1, 2 and 3. (DOCX)

Eye movements have become a commonly used response measure in studies of spoken language processing. These studies are included in the so-called ‘visual world paradigm' in which participants' eye movements are monitored during scene viewing in language comprehension and production activities. In this chapter the most important aspects for running e...

This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weight contextual information in an adult-like way (Weighall 2008) and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information...

Different psycholinguistic theories have suggested the importance of verb semantics in rapidly anticipating upcoming information during real-time sentence comprehension. To date, no study has examined if children use verbs to predict arguments and adjuncts in sentence comprehension using children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twenty-five...

According to the dual coding theory, differences in the ease of retrieval between concrete and abstract words are related to the exclusive dependence of abstract semantics on linguistic information. Argument structure can be considered a measure of the complexity of the linguistic contexts that accompany a verb. If the retrieval of abstract verbs r...

Perception of audio-visual speech synchrony in Spanish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment – CORRIGENDUM - Volume 40 Issue 3 - FERRAN PONS, LLORENÇ ANDREU, MONICA SANZTORRENT, LUCÍA BUILLEGAZ, DAVID J. LEWKOWICZ

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge...

Twenty-five children with specific language impairment (SLI; age 5 years, 3 months [5;3]–8;2), 50 typically developing children (3;3–8;2), and 31 normal adults participated in three eye-tracking experiments of spoken language comprehension that were designed to investigate the use of verb information during real-time sentence comprehension in Spani...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been applied as a therapeutic tool in clinical interventions since few years. Although first approaches were focused in rehabilitation of motor functions, nowadays some researchers and clinicians are interested in cognitive rehabilitation. Research in executive functions and TMS are really scarce in norma...

Background: This study investigated verb argument structure effects in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Aims: A picture-naming paradigm was used to compare the response times and naming accuracy for nouns and verbs with differing argument structure between Spanish-speaking children with and without language impairment. Methods & Pr...

ABSTRACT Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the...

Background: This study investigated verb argument structure effects in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Aims: A picture-naming paradigm was used to compare the response times and naming accuracy for nouns and verbs with differing argument structure between Spanish-speaking children with and without language impairment. Methods & Pr...

Unlabelled: Nouns are fundamentally different from verbs semantically and syntactically, since verbs can specify one, two, or three nominal arguments. In this study, 25 children with Specific Language Impairment (age 5;3-8;2 years) and 50 typically developing children (3;3-8;2 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment of spoken language co...

This study investigates narrative comprehension and production in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI (mean age 5;8 years) and 12 typically developing children (mean age 5;6 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate online narrative comprehension and production in Catalan- and S...

El presente artículo describe tres estudios sobre la producción del verbo y la estructura argumental en niños con Trastorno Específico del Lenguaje (TEL) usando diferentes metodologías. El primero es un estudio observacional que usa una muestra de habla espontánea. El segundo usa una tarea experimental de denominación de oraciones como resultado de...

El presente trabajo se centra en estudiar la relación que existe entre el desarrollo de léxico y el de la morfosintaxis. Concretamente pretendemos explorar el tipo de vocabulario que mejor predice el desarrollo de la morfología verbal y el de la complejidad gramatical, así como establecer el tipo de relación entre desarrollo léxico y desarrollo mor...

This study explores how the delay in oral language development and specific language impairment affects the reading development in 11-year-old children. For this reason, we assessed the reading of eight 11 years-old children that all of them had initially been diagnosed as language delay (at 3 years-old) and at 5 years-old were classified according...

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to ident...

RESUMEN Las dificultades y los trastornos del lenguaje en el inicio de su adquisición tienen importantes repercusiones en el resto de aprendizajes escolares. Por ello, se exponen algunas reflexiones en torno a diferentes aspectos del lenguaje de los niños en la escuela, la importancia de su observación y seguimiento y se distingue el retraso del tr...