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Ways of Analyzing the Spontaneous Speech of Children with Mental Retardation: The Value of Cross-Domain Analyses
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the traditionally used assessment measures for child language. These assessment methods take into account, the measures to represent the array of language skills crucial to a full understanding of language development. Measures appropriate for use with older children are also outlined. The chapter presents three major points; first, it argues both on theoretical and on empirical grounds, that language must be seen as a componential structure rather than as a single domain of development. Second, it demonstrates with data from a group of normally developing children and developmentally delayed populations that the componential structure of language imposes alternative procedures for assessing language development and for matching children on language skills. Third, it demonstrates that the componential model of language helps in making sense of the available descriptive data about the language development of children with mental retardation.
... Though MacWhinney was (and remains) the design genius behind CHILDES, I contributed modestly to the uptake of the tools by leading workshops to make its many features accessible to users during a period when computer analysis was unfamiliar and unintuitive, and by securing funding for a Program Project grant to demonstrate its utility in understanding trajectories of language development among children with various developmental histories (Snow & Pan, 1993). That work offered opportunities for collaboration with Heidi Feldman, Jean Berko Gleason, Pamela Rollins, Gina Conti-Ramsden, Jeff Sokolov, and many others (e.g., Rollins, Pan, Conti-Ramsden & Snow, 1994), but most notably with Barbara Pan, who co-taught many CHILDES workshops and coordinated the project on communicative develop of normally developing children conducted at HGSE (Pan, Imbens-Bailey, Winner & Snow, 1996;Snow, Pan, Imbens-Bailey & Herman, 1996). ...
The lessons I have learned over the last many years seem always to come in pairs – a lesson about the findings that brings with it a lesson about life as a researcher...Lesson 1. Even as a doctoral student, I believed that the sorts of social interactions young children had with adults supported language acquisition. In 1971, when I completed my dissertation, that was a minority view, and one ridiculed by many. I was, unfortunately, deflected from a full-on commitment to research on the relationship between social environment and language development for many years by the general atmosphere of disdain for such claims. In the intervening years, of course, evidence to support the claim has accumulated, and now it is generally acknowledged that a large part of the variance among children in language skills can be explained by their language environments. This consensus might have been achieved earlier had I and others been braver about pursuing it.[Download the PDF and read more...]
... It is important then to understand the relative contribution that grammatical morphemes and content words make to utterance length. Evidence that their contribution may differ between children comes from case studies reported in Snow & Pan (1993) whose data on normally-developing children with MLU-m scores of 1.30-1.33 varied enormously in use of morphological markers. ...
In the past decade the existence of individual differences in both rate and route of language development has been widely accepted. Some between-child differences are observed in the synchro nization of morphological with semantic skills. These differences are obscured by portmanteau measures like MLU. The purpose of this paper is to explore semantic and morphological predictors of MLU in order to identify individual variation in language development in a fairly large number of typically developing children. To accomplish this goal, we identified two additional variables: NPSAT, a measure of morphological skill, and MLU cw, a measure of utterance length in content words. A growth modelling strategy was used to identify both 'within-child' and 'between-child' differences in longitudinal data from 36 children. We found that typically developing children indeed use different strategies in lengthening their utterances. We therefore recommend caution in the use of MLU to 'language match' children when doing research on early language development.
... However, the idea that features of the task may affect a language measure such as MLU differentially in a clinical population and the comparison group has only recently been explored (e.g., Johnston, 2001;Miolo, Chapman, & Sindberg, 2005). Interactionist models of language development (e.g., Bock, 1982;Chapman et al., 1992;Elman et al., 1996;Snow & Pan, 1993) propose that multiple domains contribute to the language that gets produced at any one time and that the domains drawn on may vary depending on the context. These models would predict that MLU would vary with sources contributing to language production, including variations in sampling procedures. ...
Purpose
The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of the narrative context increased the MLU for the group with DS alone.
Method
Adolescents with DS (n = 14) and TD children (n = 14) matched for receptive syntax narrated picture storybooks and participated in interviews. Transcription reliability, intelligibility/fluency, grammatical errors, discourse and sampling contexts, and discourse characteristics were examined for their effects on MLU.
Results
The DS group showed a greater responsiveness to adult questions than the TD group; an alternate MLU without yes/no responses showed the same interaction of group and context as the original finding. An additional comparison of MLUs, obtained from narratives present in the interview and narratives elicited using picture books, showed that picture support in narrative increased MLUs only for the group with DS.
Conclusion
Picture support, rather than narrative context alone, increased MLUs for the group with DS. Clinical use of narratives and picture support in assessment and intervention with individuals with DS is discussed.
This chapter discusses the history of psychological theory and research in mental retardation since World War II. The concepts of mental retardation are quite ancient, modern scientific psychology, including its concern with mental retardation, developed only in the late 19th century. There was a time when the main clinical activity of psychologists working in mental retardation was administering intelligence tests. Their work in counseling and therapy with retarded persons and their families was not supported by research evidence. The development of applied behavior analysis, such as in the treatment of psychopathology, including aggression, self-injurious behavior, stereotypies, and autism, as well as self-help and communicative skills and in persons with retardation, spearheaded change. The use of psychotropic medications in institutions for persons with retardation is discussed in this chapter. Phenothiazines, such as chlorpromazine, had first been introduced in France in the early 1950s and were widely used to treat patients with schizophrenia. The study of psychopathology in mental retardation has moved from a state of ignorance, regarding the relationship of these two types of disorders, to the realization that they overlap substantially. Interventions, both behavioral and pharmacological, have been developed and studied rigorously.
RESUMEN En este artículo se presenta un meta-análisis de la investigación psicológica so-bre el retraso mental, llevada a cabo desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Fundamentalmente, el estudio se ha basado en los artículos publicados en Ame-rican Journal on Mental Retardation. PALABRAS CLAVES Historia. Retraso mental. Meta-análisis. ABSTRACT In this study, a meta-analysis about the psychologichological research on mental retardation is shown, since world war II.
This study investigated the relationship between mildy retarded children's conversational competence and their acceptance by regular education students. Ninety-four elementary school students watched videotapes in which mildly retarded children displayed either skill or lack of skill at conversational management. Half of the students were told the retarded children's special education placement; half were not. Students responded more positively when the mildly retarded children displayed skill at managing conversations, projecting that they would be liked by others in their classrooms. When the mildly retarded children showed problems with conversational management, students projected that they would be rejected or isolated by peers. These findings support the position that language can play an important role in children's response to their handicapped peers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In this article, we present data from a longitudinal investigation of the development of language and communicative skills in infants suffering from focal brain injury in the pre- or perinatal period. We focus on phonological analyses of babbling and first words, and parental reports of the use of gestures for communicative purposes, word comprehension, and word production. Results indicate that all children were delayed in the number of gestures they were reported to produce, as well as in reported lexical production. Reported comprehension was also typically well below age level; however, age-appropriate comprehension was observed in one child throughout the period sampled. Phonological analyses revealed both similarities and differences between the early vocalizations of the neurologically involved children and those of the control group. Most notably, the vocalizations of the children with brain injury contained a smaller proportion of “true” consonants at the earliest session. The children who showed an increase in the proportion of consonant production by the third testing session were those who had also begun to produce words by this period. Thus, phonological and lexical developments were both observed during the period studied here, with improvement most evident in children with damage to anterior (as opposed to posterior) brain areas. Lastly, like normally developing children, children with brain injury displayed idiosyncratic patterns of consonant articulation. These tendencies were observed in all vocalizations, both babble and words, suggesting that continuity of consonant place and manner is evident even in the face of general delay in the acquisition of communicative abilities.
This study was designed to examine the degree to which individual differences in gestural joint attention skills predicted language development among autistic children. A group of 15 autistic children (mean CA=45 months) were matched with one group of mentally retarded (MR) children on mental age and another group of MR children on language age. These groups were administered the Early Social-Communication Scales. The latter provided measures of gestural requesting, joint attention, and social behaviors. The results indicated that, even when controlling for language level, mental age, or IQ, autistic children displayed deficits in gestural joint attention skills on two testing sessions that were 13 months apart. Furthermore, the measure of gestural nonverbal joint attention was a significant predictor of language development in the autistic sample. Other variables, including initial language level and IQ were not significant predictors of language development in this sample.
In this study, aspects of language, single-gesture retrieval, combinatorial play, and visual-spatial cognition are reported in two children with Williams syndrome who were in the single-word stage of language acquisition. Williams syndrome children are of particular interest because, when older (10–15 years), they display an unusual profile of abilities that may include superior linguistic performance compared with other aspects of cognition. The two children in the present study are compared to a group of normal children in the single-word stage of language acquisition with a mean age of 14.8 months, a group of single-word stage children who are 6–18 months delayed, and a group of older normal children with a mean age of 23.5 months. Results are compatible with the unusual cognitive profile displayed by older Williams syndrome children. We discuss the possibility that this profile involves mechanisms that extend beyond the boundaries of language proper.
In this review the specific language and communication impairments of autistic individuals are discussed and contrasted with non-specific impairments. All the impairments that are unique to autism concern the use of language for the purpose of intentional (but not instrumental) communication. The specific communication failure can be identified with a limitation in the computing of relevance and as a lack of taking account of mental states. This is a consequence of a subtle, but far-reaching, cognitive dysfunction. The dysfunction is likely to involve the formation and use of second-order representations. The same problem also leads to specific impairment in social relationships and imaginative play.
When carefully assessed and analysed, parent report can provide a valuable overall evaluation of children's language at 20 months. Norming information and validity coefficients are presented here for a vocabulary checklist assessment included in the Early Language Inventory. Normative data are provided for fullterm, preterm, and precocious samples, including selected vocabulatory subsets that are indicative of early language learning style. The vocabulary checklist has substantial validity as indexed by correlations with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and particularly with a language subscale derived from that test.
Autistic adolescents with mild, moderate, and severe degrees of mental retardation, Down's syndrome adolescents, and clinically normal 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were compared in their ability to understand a set of simple instrumental gestures. Almost all gestures were perfectly understood, that is, correctly responded to, by normal children from age 5 onwards, and by all the handicapped groups, regardless of diagnosis or degree of retardation. However, the ability to initiate such gestures on verbal request was generally less good, especially in the less able autistic groups. The same subjects were unobtrusively observed in the playground and during mealtime at their schools. Peer interactions were least frequent in the autistic subjects, regardless of degree of mental retardation. However, relative to interaction frequency, the autistic group used nonverbal instrumental gestures as a means of communication to the same extent as the other groups. Unlike Down's syndrome adolescents, or normal preschool children, no autistic adolescent ever used expressive gestures.
Maternal language directed towards children with mental retardation and children matched either for language ability or chronological age was compared in free-play and instruction situations. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that mothers of children with retardation match their verbal behavior to their children's language ability while at the same time adopting a more pervasive teaching role. Specifically, they were more directive, but only in free-play. When explicitly asked to instruct their child, they changed very little in comparison with control mothers, whose directive behavior altered to levels previously adopted in free-play by mothers of children with mental retardation.
Autism is characterized by a chronic, severe impairment in social relations. Recent studies of language in autism also show pervasive deficits in pragmatics. We assume, uncontroversially, that these two deficits are linked, since pragmatics is part of social competence. This paper reviews the literature describing these deficits, and then considers two different psychological theories of these phenomena: the Affective theory and the Cognitive theory. Although the Affective theory makes better sense of the results from emotional recognition tasks, the Cognitive theory predicts the particular pattern of impaired and unimpaired social skills in autism, as well as the pragmatic deficits. These two theories might usefully be integrated in the future.
Pre-meaningful vocalizations produced by nine normally developing and 10 Down's syndrome infants were recorded as part of a longitudinal study of language development. The recordings were phonetically transcribed using a modified version of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Data were analyzed in terms of (1) age at onset of reduplicated babbling (2) developmental trends for place of consonant articulation, and (3) developmental aspects of vocalic productions. In general, substantial similarities between the two groups of infants were observed with regard to the selected parameters. Both groups began to produce canonical, reduplicated babbling at 8-8 1/2 months of age, and trends regarding consonantal and vocalic development for the two groups were very similar during approximately the first 15 months of life.
The purpose of this study was to examine profiles of communicative and cognitive-social abilities in a small group of autistic children functioning in the prelinguistic and early stages of language development and to compare them with those of normal children functioning at similar stages of language development. The results of measures in the cognitive-social areas of communicative intent, tool use, imitation, and play and in language comprehension demonstrated uneven development for the autistic subjects. A functional analysis of communicative behaviors indicated that, despite a wide variation in communicative means, the autistic subjects displayed a relatively homogeneous profile of communicative functions that was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the normal profile. Explanations for the heterochrony in communicative and cognitive-social development of these autistic children are discussed.
This study compared the narrative abilities of mildly mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Twenty mildly mentally retarded children and 20 nonretarded children, matched on mental age, PPVT-R scores, and SES were audiotaped while narrating a wordless picture book story. Results showed no differences between the groups in narrative length, use of tense and conjunctions, and use of narrative devices. However, there were significant differences in use of reference, with the mildly retarded children using more definite article + noun character introductions, showing more pronoun confusion, and more often pronominalizing all references to the story protagonist. Control of reference in narrative is discussed as presenting a particularly challenging set of discourse abilities because it requires the child to integrate knowledge across a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic domains.
Four mildly retarded Down's syndrome (DS) children (mean age 5.4 yrs) in Stage 1 of language development (mean length of utterance ranged from 1.00 to 2.00 morphemes) and with mild deficits in adaptive behavior (AAMD Adaptive Behavior Scale) were provided with a range of linguistic and nonlinguistic experiences that encouraged a representative use of language. Each S's response to an adult's clarification request was classified as either repetition, revision, or no response. Results show that no clarification request went unheeded and indicate that by the time these Ss are beginning to produce 2-word utterances, they will already understand the necessity of clarifying misunderstood utterances in order to maintain conversational continuity. Data suggest that T. Gallagher's (see record
1978-12048-001) conversational imperative may be operative for young DS language learners and Stage-1 nonretarded children. Findings do not support J. McLean and L. Snyder-McLean's (1978) hypothesis that retarded children use language differently than young nonretarded children in conversational situations. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Editor's Note: The current issue of Focus on Autistic Behavior features a reprint of Barry Prizant and Amy Wetherby's article, “Providing Services to Children with Autism (Ages 0 to 2 Years) and Their Families.” The article originally appeared in Topics in Language Disorders (1988, Vol. 9, No. I, pp. 1-23). Periodically the editorial staff will recommend reprinting classic articles (i.e., those that have withstood the test of time or have had significant impact for a period of time) as well as previously published works that appear to have particular merit. Prizant and Wetherby provide a unique look at issues, assessment methods, and intervention procedures for very young children and youths with autism. They describe not only difficulties encountered by professionals who work with young autistic children and youths, but also utilitarian assessment and intervention methods and suggestions. Special emphasis is given to communication and language development, areas of particular concern for both families and professionals involved with very young children with autism and pervasive developmental disorders. “Providing Services to Children with Autism (Ages 0 to 2 Years) and Their Families” offers a look at a population that has heretofore been largely neglected.
Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological proficiency. For all groups, a strong curvilinear association between measures was found across the MLU range from 1.0 to about 4.5. Correlations were weaker when MLU exceeded 3.0 than during earlier stages of language development, however, confirming previous suggestions that MLU becomes less closely associated with grammatical development as linguistic proficiency increases. For the language-disordered groups, moreover, the curves relating the two measures differed from the curves for the normal preschoolers because MLU frequently overestimated actual IPSyn scores. The results are discussed with respect to the use of MLU in conjunction with other measures of syntactic complexity in the study of atypical language development.
The authors analyzed 104 language samples, obtained from 42 different normal language learning children at 25, 29, and 35 months of age, for the proportional use of 11 grammatical morphemes: plural -s, possessive 's, progressive -ing, regular and irregular past, and regular and irregular present, as well as the contractible and uncontractible forms of the copula and auxiliary to be. Wide variability was found among the samples in the proportional use of each morpheme, whether the samples were grouped by age or mean length of utterance (MLU). At ages 25 and 29 months, the range of proportional use was over .95 for 9 of the 11 morphemes, and at 35 months, it was .50 or greater for 8. At an MLU level of 2.50–2.99, the range of scores was .90 or greater for 8 of the morphemes, and over .65 for the remaining 3. By MLUs of 4.00 or more, ranges had narrowed but were still .50 or greater for 4 of the morphemes. Rank order of acquisition by MLU level varied somewhat from that previously reported in the literature (e.g., contractible copula was ranked higher and irregular past was ranked lower than has been reported in other studies). Correlations of MLU and morpheme use ranged from .11 to .74, with rho > .60 for only 3 and <.35 for 4 morphemes. Comparisons of these data with those reported in the literature on specifically language-impaired (SLI) children indicated that group means were generally lower for SLI children, but that many of the SLI children's scores overlapped with those of the children studied here.
Several studies have reported that the articulatory abilities of Down's syndrome children are poor, but have provided little detail on the nature of the articulation problem. This paper presents a phonological analysis of the spontaneous speech of four Down's syndrome children, ages 3;10–6;3 including a) the phonetic inventory of each subject, b) a comparison of target consonant phonemes and the subjects' renditions of these phonemes, and c) a characterization of the subjects' errors in terms of phonological processes. The findings indicate that 1) although the subjects are capable of producing nearly all the consonant phonemes, correct production is often limited to a particular position within the word, 2) the phonological processes which account for the errors of the Down's syndrome subjects are similar to those reported for young normal children, and 3) the phonological abilities of the four subjects are comparable to, or better than, their general language ability as measured by MLU.
A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.
This study investigated the influence of the communicative situation on the directives produced by retarded children and nonretarded kindergartners. The two groups were matched on nonverbal MA and on the linguistic maturity of their spontaneous speech. All children could produce the linguistic forms appropriate for the experimental task. In the experimental task, directives were elicited in role-playing situations which differed on three dimensions: addressee age, cause of the directive, and purpose of the directive. As measured by directive politeness, the retarded and nonretarded children were influenced similarly by the situational manipulations. However, they relied on different linguistic forms to convey directives. Many children had a preferred form. Within and between group differences in form preferences were observed.
This study examined the communicative behavior of mildly retarded adults engaged in conversation with peers. Contemporary models of pragmatic interaction were applied to samples of triadic naturally occurring conversation. The subjects made few errors in turn-taking; moreover, the rule system involved was consistent with that posited for nonretarded adults. They recognized those illocutionary acts that obligated them to respond as well as the specific responses required. That they were actively involved in information exchange was indicated by the observation that the majority of their turns were responses to the preceding turns of others, even when under no obligation to respond. Individual differences on most measures were observed, and the measures appeared related to each other, but not to IQ. Unexpectedly, the subjects produced few indirect speech acts.
Differences associated with age and with language background were assessed in performance on a task thin taps conversational skill, a ‘TV talk show’ interview task administered to 98 second through fifth graders, including many nonnative speakers of English. Surprisingly, holistic ratings of the childrenapos;s skills as conversationalists were not related at all to gender, and only moderately to age or status as a native speaker of English. A set of 29 specific interactive and language behaviors were analyzed, to determine which of these were related to holistic ratings of conversational skill. Variables reflected strategies for eliciting information and for maintaining topic, indicators of disfluency, ami indicators of how the adult was contributing to the conversation. Children who had received higher ratings on conversational skill produced more topic continuations, a higher proportion of more sophisticated noncontingent responses, and fewer simple yes/no topic initiations and continuations. Age, gender, and language status related only minimally to the specific interactive or language behaviors associated with success as a conversationalist, although children from homes where English was spoken did tend to receive higher holistic ratings of conversational skill.
This study examined the communicative intentions encoded by a group of normally developing preschool children and a group of Down's syndrome children matched for cognitive level and general linguistic abilities. The results revealed no significant differences between groups with respect to their use of a variety of intentional communicative behaviours. These findings suggest that young retarded children at a two-word stage of linguistic development may be as flexible and diverse in their use of language during social interactions as are nonretarded children.
Early childhood autism is a syndrome which appears during the first 30 months of life and is typified by a severe disturbance in language development, among other behavioural abnormalities. Since no systematic linguistic investigation of autistic children is available, an investigation of the phonological characteristics often autistic children was carried out, in the areas of both production and perception of speech sounds. In order to investigate the possibility of atypical phonological characteristics in this group, they were compared with normal and mentally retarded children matched on a nonlinguistic test of mental age.The results suggest that the autistic group shows a delayed pattern of acquisition of phonological characteristics similar to that found in the mentally retarded group.
There were two purposes underlying this study: to describe the sensorimotor functioning of mute autistic children and to relate their sensorimotor performance to nonverbal communication. Twelve mute children, diagnosed autistic, ranging from 4 years 9 months to 12 years of age, were administered four scales of sensorimotor development from the Uzgiris and Hunt (1975) series: object permanence, gestural imitation, means for obtaining environmental events, and causality. Subjects performed most poorly on the imitation scale with 9 of 12 performing below Piaget's fifth sensorimotor stage. In contrast, performance was highest on the object permanence scale: No child scored below Stage V. Regarding the subjects' non-verbal communication, Stage V performance on the means and causality scales and Stage III on the imitation scale appeared to form minimal prerequisites for intentional communication in a variety of situations. Finally, none of the subjects, even those with relatively complete sensorimotor development, spontaneously used what Bates (1976) has called protodeclarative gestures to point out or show objects to adults. The absence of protodeclarative gestures may represent a qualitatively distinct pattern of prelinguistic development in certain autistic children.
Early lexical development in 27 children with focal brain injury was studied cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Data were obtained from children between 12 and 35 months of age who acquired their lesion prenatally or within the first 6 months of life. Results for the group as a whole provide clear evidence for delays in lexical comprehension and production, and for a larger number of comprehension/production dissociations than would be expected by chance. In addition, a significant number of children were observed having unusual difficulty mastering predication and/or using an atypically high proportion of closed class words (suggesting reliance on holistic/formulaic speech). Analyses by lesion type revealed no effect of lesion size. Analyses according to side of lesion revealed that children with right-hemisphere damage produced a higher proportion of closed class words, suggesting heavy reliance on well-practiced but under-analyzed speech formulae. Children with left-hemisphere damage were slightly better in comprehension than children with right-hemisphere damage. In addition, left posterior lesions were associated with greater delays in expressive language, and delays were more protracted in children with left posterior damage. No differential effects of left posterior damage were found for lexical comprehension.
Twenty-seven children with childhood injury to the left hemisphere were tested for language function and compared with appropriate controls. Eleven children had incurred their lesions before the age of 1 year, 16 afterward. The group with perinatal injury to the left hemisphere did not show a specific aphasic deficit even though they were mildly cognitively impaired. The group of children with later injury to the left hemisphere showed aphasic deficits if the original injury had caused a language defect; otherwise the left hemisphere injury was not associated with specific disturbances in language function. The average age at time of lesion in those children who had recovered from aphasia was 4.7 years. We conclude that even when childhood aphasia results from a unilateral nonprogressive lesion, recovery of language is less complete than has been generally supposed.
The study was designed to provide data on the maternal linguistic environments of normal and Down's syndrome children at three levels of language development, as assessed by children's mean length of utterances (MLU). The three MLU levels were 1.00--1.50, 1.75--2.25, and 2.50--3.00, respectively. The subjects were 21 Down's syndrome children and their natural mothers and 21 normal children and their natural mothers. Normal children ranged in chronological age from 20 to 32 months and Down's syndrome children from 3 to 12 years. A one-hour verbal interaction between mother and child was tape recorded at home in a free-play situation. Maternal speech was analyzed using 20 measures related to its output-numerical, lexical, syntactical, semantic-structural, semantic-pragmatic, and language-teaching aspects. Additionally, eight measures of children's speech related to the output-numerical, lexical, syntactical semantic-structural aspects, and to imitativeness of maternal speech were computed as a means of testing the validity of the MLU-matching that forms a basis for this study. Except for the Type-token ratio, which favored Down's syndrome children, normal and Down's syndrome children were not found to differ. In contrast, there were numerous differences between the children in the different aspects of speech considered according to language level. None of the comparisons made of mother's speech to normal and to Down's syndrome children led to differences for any of the three children's language levels studied. It appeared that the maternal linguistic environments of language-learning Down's syndrome and normal children of corresponding MLU were similar in most respects. In contrast, there were numerous differences in mother's speech according to the language level of the children addressed. This confirmed that the expressive language level of the children is a far more powerful factor in influencing maternal speech than whether they are normal or Down's syndrome children. The implications of these findings were related to the delay-difference question in the language development of Down's syndrome children and to various interpretations of the effects of maternal linguistic input for language development and for intervention programs of language enhancement in the Down's syndrome child.
The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. We have, therefore, begun a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrate in this paper on comparing the syntax used by 10 verbal autistic children matched for nonlinguistic mental age with a group of mentally retarded subjects and normal controls. Two different means of assessing syntactic development were utilized: Lee's Developmental Sentence analysis and Chomsky's Transformational analysis. The autistic group was found to rank significantly lower than either the mentally retarded or the normal groups in terms of Developmental Sentence Scores. When a transformational grammar was used to describe the language samples of our subjects the autistic children were typified by a higher error rate and lower level of complexity compared to the other two groups. However, the results also indicate that the grammatical system of autistic children is rule-governed and probably not unlike that of young normal or retarded children. In conclusion, it appears that the syntactic abnormalities characteristic of autism are attributable to an extreme delay in language development as well as to an impaired ability to make use of linguistic rules.
A review of the pertinent literature indicates that autistic children are likely to show normal but delayed development of speech sounds. In contrast, atypical phonological development is suggested by experiments demonstrating that autistic subjects are deficient in their ability to extract the components of structured auditory input. A systematic investigation of the speech sound systems of verbal autistic and mentally retarded children reveals a delay in phoneme acquisition, as well as a relative uniformity of error types in both groups. The autistic subjects, however, differ significantly from the mentally retarded in the phonemic substitutions which they make. Autistic subjects are also characterized by a high correlation between frequency of phonological errors and level of overall language development. The findings are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the autistic group shows a more global delay in language development.
Rate of linguistic imitation by 48 children with Down syndrome was compared to that of 57 children without mental retardation. Both groups were taken from different corpora within the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 1991). All speech data were collected from spontaneous speech samples of mothers interacting with their children. Three types of imitative utterances (exact, expanded, and reduced) were coded using an automatic data analysis program called CHIP (Sokolov & MacWhinney, 1990). Multiple regression was utilized to test for group differences while controlling for variability in MLU. The results indicated that children with Down syndrome imitated slightly less, but the exact nature of this difference was related to language level and the source of the imitation. As MLU increased, the rate of imitation decreased at a much steeper rate for children without mental retardation than for children with Down syndrome. In addition, children with Down syndrome showed a different pattern of results for imitations of their mothers than for self-repeated imitations. The results suggest that children with Down syndrome develop differently with respect to linguistic imitation.
This longitudinal study describes the growth of syntactic abilities and vocabulary size in nine children with unilateral antepartum or perinatal brain injury. Five children with left hemisphere damage (LHD) and four with right hemisphere damage (RHD), ages 15 to 48 months, were evaluated on three or more occasions. Language samples generated from parent-child interaction were transcribed, coded, and analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System. Individual growth trajectories were constructed by graphing three dependent variables--MLU, scores on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSYN), and number of different words--as a function of the child's age. One subject remained in a prelinguistic stage throughout the study. Simple linear functions best described the growth of MLU, IPSYN scores, and vocabulary in the other eight children. The slopes of the individual growth trajectories, the graphic representations of rates of progress, were comparable in the eight children. Seven children showed developmental delays in initial word use and five in the onset of multiword utterances. However, by age 24 months, four children with LHD and two children with RHD had syntactic capabilities comparable to those of children without brain injuries. The developmental patterns suggested that both cerebral hemispheres may play critical roles in the very earliest stages of language acquisition. Some unilateral lesions caused little discernible effect on language outcome in the toddler-preschool years after the initial developmental delays.
This study investigated communicative competence in autistic children. Six autistic boys were matched to six children with Down syndrome on age and language level. For each child four samples of spontaneous speech over the course of 1 year were analysed. Child utterances were coded for adjacency, contingency and various categories of contingent discourse that either did or did not add new information. Autistic children wer found to be more non-contingent, and to show no developmental change in their contingent discourse, especially in categories of contingent discourse that added new information.
Findings from a longitudinal study of language acquisition in a group of autistic children are presented. Six autistic subjects and six children with Down syndrome, matched on age and MLU at the start of the study, were followed over a period of between 12 and 26 months. Language samples were collected in the children's homes while they interacted with their mothers. Samples of 100 spontaneous child utterances from the transcripts were analyzed using the following measures: MLU, Index of Productive Syntax, lexical diversity, and form class distribution. The results indicate that the majority of these autistic children followed the same general developmental path as the Down syndrome children in this study, and normal children reported in the literature, in the acquisition of grammatical and lexical aspects of language, and confirm previous findings suggesting that autism does not involve a fundamental impairment in formal aspects of language.
Preschool-aged children (11 with and 11 without Down syndrome), individually matched for communicative ability, mental age, and demographic variables, were videotaped while interacting with their mothers during 15-minutes of free play in a simulated playroom. Maternal responsiveness and three components of maternal directiveness were examined in the context of the child's interactional behavior. Both groups of mothers used a high frequency of controls, but used them primarily to support and encourage the child's participation in interaction. Although mothers of children with Down syndrome exerted greater control in most of the aspects of directiveness, they were not less responsive. Mothers of children without Down syndrome were more likely to silently watch their children who, in turn, were more likely to initiate topics than were the children with the syndrome.
Understanding the speech act(s) a sentence conveys requires that a listener follow conversational rules and use clues provided by the sentence and the context in which it is spoken. To trace the development of speech act comprehension in mentally retarded and nonretarded school age children, we examined their responses to sentences such as Would you open the telephone book? and Could you roll the shoebox? These sentences can be intended as questions or as directives. Nonretarded adults follow the "answer obviousness" rule and interpret a sentence of this type as a question if the answer to the question is nonobvious to the speaker, but as a directive if the question has an obvious answer. We manipulated answer obviousness by varying both the context and linguistic properties of the interrogative. Retarded and nonretarded individuals at the nonverbal MAs of 5, 7, and 9 years were studied. Retarded and nonretarded individuals at all MAs followed the answer obviousness rule and used the contextual and linguistic clues available. There were only minor differences between MA-matched retarded and nonretarded subjects despite the fact that the retarded subjects had serious deficits in receptive linguistic competence. The implications for understanding the development of comprehension in retarded persons and for understanding the relations among language, cognition, and communication in general are considered.
This study examined differences in the use of immediate echolalia by autistic children at different stages of language development. Eighteen autistic children, aged 4 to 12 years, were videotaped in play sessions with a parent and with an examiner. Data were collected on frequency of echolalia, percentage of language that was echolalic, functions of echolalia (Prizant & Duchan, 1981), chronological age, nonverbal mental age, and language level. Frequency of immediate echolalia varied with expressive language level but not with nonverbal mental age or chronological age. The percentage of language that was echolalic was high at early stages of language development but decreased as language skills improved. No significant relationships were found between number of functions and language level, chronological age, or nonverbal mental age. Although coding of functions was reliable, the validity of functional categories for echolalia was not strongly supported. Implications for autistic language development and for methodology in this area are discussed.
Autistic children have been stereotyped as noncommunicative and noninteractive; however, this may be partly attributed to traditional research approaches that do not consider the intentions of the child or the context of the social interaction. This discussion reviews some recent investigations that have used a developmental pragmatics framework to study language and communicative behaviors associated with autism. A working model of the ontogeny of communicative functions in autistic children is proposed. The communicative profile associated with autism is explained by factors related to the child's language-learning environment, as well as factors inherent in the child. Clinical implications for the design of language intervention programs for autistic children are offered.
To understand better the cognitive sequelae of mild perinatal brain injury, we studied three groups of high-risk infants, using the Early Language Milestone Scale (ELM Scale). Premature infants with Grades I and II intraventricular hemorrhages (IVH) were delayed on the expressive but not the receptive subscale of the ELM Scale. Mildly asphyxiated full-term infants were slightly delayed on both the expressive and receptive subscales. Premature infants without IVH performed the same as the normal sample on which the scale was based. Although normal intellectual functioning has been reported in infants with Grade I-II IVH, this study demonstrates early specific deficits in expressive language in these children. These results are discussed in relation to localization of language in the adult brain, and the influence of subcortical structures on development and maturation of the cortex.
Eight left-hemisphere lesioned children and eight right-hemisphere lesioned children between 18 months and 8 years of age were compared to control subjects on a battery of intelligence and language measures. Both left- and right-lesioned subjects had lower IQ scores than their controls, yet most functioned within the normal range or higher. Lexical comprehension and production were depressed in both subject groups and appeared to be depressed to a greater degree in right-lesioned subjects than in those with left lesions. In contrast, syntactic production in left-lesioned subjects was markedly deficient in comparison to controls as well as right-lesioned subjects. Although both subjects and controls included children with articulation errors, the number of misarticulating children and misarticulated sounds was greatest in the left-lesioned group. Finally, fluency disorders were observed in both right- and left-lesioned subjects but were not observed in controls. The study provides further evidence that the right and left hemispheres are not equipotential for language and that left-hemisphere lesions acquired early in childhood impair syntactic development to a greater degree than do right-hemisphere lesions.
The effects of the variables of hemispheric side of lesion, age at injury and severity of cerebral damage on language performance and hand dominance were investigated in groups of hemiparetic children. Severity of cerebral damage was defined by the degree of structural abnormality shown on computed tomography (CT) scans. Tests of auditory verbal comprehension and object naming were used as indicators of productive and receptive language skills. The responses to a series of questions on a handedness inventory provided a rated measure of hand dominance.
The results indicated that language deficits characterize the performance of all patient groups with left cerebral injuries. Impairments are more profound, however, in the case of left hemisphere injuries acquired after the age of 5 years. In addition, prenatal and early postnatal left cerebral lesions consistently result in strong sinistrality.
It is concluded that the crucial variable underlying the demonstration of language deficits and left hand dominance is not severity of lesion but age at injury and hemispheric side of lesion.
The social behaviors of 14 autistic children and 14 normal children of equivalent mental age were observed during a free-play situation as well as during separation from and reunion with their mothers and a stranger. As a group, the autistic children showed evidence of attachment to their mothers, directing more social behaviors and more physical contact to their caregivers than to the stranger during the reunion episodes. Within the autistic group, the children who showed an increase in attachment behaviors in response to separation and reunion demonstrated more advanced symbolic play skills than those autistic children who showed no change in attachment behaviors. One possible explanation may be that autistic children require more advanced levels of symbolic ability to form attachments to others than is necessary for the development of attachments in normal children.
The acquisition of conversational response skills by young retarded and nonretarded children matched for chronological age (CA) and expressive linguistic ability was compared. Retarded children showed delayed response performance in comparison with CA-matched nonretarded peers. When matched for language level, however, retarded children demonstrated significantly greater response abilities than did nonretarded children. These findings indicate that the language development process of retarded children is developmentally delayed and different with respect to the synchrony of syntactic development and communicative competence. The findings further suggest that the acquisition of conversational response rules is not determined by the child's expressive language ability as measured by a mean length of utterance score, but is directly influenced by social-experiential factors as measured by the child's age.
The development of conversation requires that children learn to relate their utterances to preceding utterances from other speakers. This investigation examined one way that retarded children relate their utterances to preceding utterances in conversation, namely, response to requests. Late Stage 1 Down's Syndrome children's responses were examined for their pragmatic and semantic relationships to four types of requests used by mothers. Conditional probabilities and unconditional probabilities were generated using the lag sequential analysis to evaluate the relationship between mothers' requests and children's responses. The level of significance of the difference between the conditional and unconditional probabilities was then determined with the binomial distribution. The results indicate that the children produced contingent linguistic responses to the mothers' requests based on the pragmatic intent of the requests; specifically, those requesting information, clarifying a misunderstood remark, and requesting agreement or disagreement with a proposition. The children produced contingent non-linguistic responses to the mothers' requests for action performance. These findings indicate that responses to requests used by retarded children in Late Stage 1 of linguistic development are the same responses used by normal children at this linguistic stage. In addition, the study suggests that other factors, such as the use of revision behaviors and semantically appropriate responses, account for individual differences observed in the communicative success of the retarded children.
This paper provides a review of studies conducted on linguistic functioning in autistic children, within the framework developed in normal language acquisition research. Despite certain methodological weaknesses, the research consistently shows that phonological and syntactic development follow the same course as in normal children and in other disordered groups, though at a slowed rate, while semantic and pragmatic functioning may be specially deficient in autism. These findings are related to other recent studies on the relative independence of different aspects of language.
The frequency of occurrence of functors in obligatory contexts was studied in verbal autistic and mentally retarded children matched for nonverbal mental age, and the percentages of correct use of functors were rank-ordered. The grammatical complexity of their language was also described using a transformational grammar. The data were compared to those obtained in a normal group matched for mental age and to the data presented by Brown (1973) and deVilliers and deVilliers (1973) in younger children. The autistic subjects omitted functors frequently and independently of the grammatical complexity of their language. The rank ordering of morphemes was consistent within both the autistic and mentally retarded groups but showed no correlation between the two groups or to the rank ordering described by deVilliers and deVilliers. It is suggested that functors in autistic subjects may develop in an atypical but consistent order and that this may be due to specific semantic deficits, particularly in the areas of person and time deixis.
Six children diagnosed as autistic and who also were reported to be using questions inappropriately in their conversations with adults were each placed in a conversational context in which the adult responses to their questions were systematically varied. The dependent variable was the occurrence and amount of appropriate conversational continuation associated with each type of adult response. Differential listener response did affect the occurrence of conversational continuation and to a lesser degree the amount of continuation. These data were interpreted to support the hypothesis that repetitive questioning in this population serves the communicative function of conversation initiation. Furthermore, it appears that the autistic conversants lack the conversational management skills to maintain the conversation following the listener's answer to the question.
Differential responsiveness to social stimuli was demonstrated in the communicative performance of an 8-year-old autistic boy. The pragmatic behavior of the subject varied with different communicative settings (waiting vs. interaction conditions) as well as with different communicative partners (mother, stranger, clinician). Communicative intentions, relational communication, topic strategies and differential responding of adults communicative and non-communicative utterances were analyzed.
Results indicated that the adults' communicative performance was a function of their relationship with the subject (mother, stranger, clinician) as well as the different experimental conditions (waiting, interacting). The child's communicative behavior showed greater consistency in conditions with the same interlocutor than over comparable experimental settings.
Conclusions were drawn on how to facilitate communicative behavior and how to enhance generalization of remedial effects to the subject's natural environment.