Language Disorders - Science topic

Les signes et les symptômes de la schizophrénie impliquent généralement des idées délirantes, des hallucinations ou un discours désorganisé, et reflètent une altération de la capacité de fonctionner. La pensée est déduite du discours désorganisé. Une communication efficace peut être altérée et les réponses aux questions peuvent être partiellement ou totalement sans rapport. Rarement, le discours peut inclure l'assemblage de mots sans signification qui ne peuvent être compris, parfois appelés salade de mots.

Mayo Clinic

It's better to know what procedures are designed.

I have it. If you need it, I ll send it to you. Just write your email here.

Regards

Following.

Hi Ulrich Rüth , I'm working in with a paediatric population, but you are absolutely correct, that Developmental Language Disorder (and other language impairments) can persist into adulthood for many individuals affected, and it is helpful for the person to (1) be aware of their strengths & weaknesses, (2) be supported to develop compensatory strategies, (3) continue to develop specific skills as indicated, and (4) be able to share relevant information about this with current/future employers, colleagues, and friends.

When I have worked with older adolescents around this issue, assessments by a psychologist & speech pathologist can clarify if the challenges are predominantly in the language domain. As a speech pathologist, we then collaborate with the client to identify compensatory strategies & approaches that will be helpful. There are resources that I use clinically, dependent upon whether the main challenges are in the academic area, workplace, or social (pragmatic) sphere.

Factors leading to muscle tension of what's called hyperfunction dysphonia are abuse and misuse of voice shouting screaming talking in background noise ,especially in non treated rooms acoustically

Hi Christine,

The Gricean maxims can have an effective purpose by serving as a framework for descriptive analysis.  I employed them a number of years ago in two different assessment tools...though not commercially available, they are in the professional literature.  I herein provide you with several articles and chapters on the procedures. I have additional work (as yet unpublished) on Clinical Discourse Analysis and Systematic Observation of Communicative Interaction if desired.

Thank you

the information here was helpful to me too. i was not aware such techniques. will try to incorporate

Hi Sara,

I'd also recommend this article:

Lu, Xiaofei (2010), Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Complexity. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(4), 474–496.

It also evaluates English, but discusses 14 different text based metrics and addresses syntactic complexity in particular, which is ignored by vocabulary based measures. For some of the methods you'll need to parse the data, but at least for Italian that should be possible (not sure about the situation for Slovenian, I think there's a dependency parser for it though).

Hope this helps!

Amir

Communication Matrix focuses early communicative skills and has been used in studies Before. https://www.communicationmatrix.org/

Have you checked fx Solomon-Rice&Soto "Facilitating Vocabulary in Toddlers Using AAC A Preliminary Study Comparing Focused Stimulation and Augmented Input" for inspiration?

Good luck

Hi Hannane,

Yes you can. Minimal contrasts does not mean minimal syllables. Minimal contrasts in phonology are often referred to as minimal pairs. That is, you have two words that are opposed by just a phonological feature, which could be a toneme or a phoneme. In a tone language like the Yoruba for example, /bo/ on a high tone means to peel, but the same /bo/. on a low tone means to cover. At the same time, /ile/ on Mid/High tones means house', but on the Mid/Low tone it means floor or ground. Also, /pako/ on High/High means plank, but on High/Low it means chewing-stick. It is much like /table/ and /cable/ or /bat/ and /rat/. They are rightly minimal pairs or contrasts. 

I do not want to overwhelm you, but I am attaching another paper of mine that I think may be of (more) interest for you. In it we discuss the problem of variation regarding language. The final part contains a characterization of disorders under the lens of Evo-Devo theories. This part tries to answer to an intriguing question: the number of disorders (at the clinical level) is quite small, but the number of aetiological factors is huge.

Best,

Antonio

Very interesting question! The answer depends, I guess, on whether an ability is defined by what it is an ability to do – quite conventional – or by theoretical constructs inferred to sustain this ability. ‘Aphasia’ is an impaired ability to use language for interpersonal communication. It has concrete behavioural manifestations in everyday life and in clinical assessment. So aphasia is a language disorder. Language can be shown to depend on a set of subordinate abilities, some of which are non-observable constructs and probably themselves further divisible into more fine-grained functions. However, it does not follow from this that aphasia is not a language disorder. Perhaps these subordinate abilities can be plausibly considered constitutive of normal language use, rather than eliminating language and aphasia by reducing it to its ‘horizontal’ functions?

Hi all,

Just wanted to add a few things.

One of the best examples I could direct you towards examples of dyslexia in one language and not another is:

Wydell, T. N., & Butterworth, B. (1999). A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia. Cognition, 70(3), 273-305.

There are two similar but distinct theories with regards to the manifestation of dyslexia in orthographies with varying degrees of transparency.

Wydell, T. N. (2003). Dyslexia in Japanese and the ‘Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency’. Dyslexia in different languages: Cross-linguistic comparisons. London: Whurr Publishers.

According to the above hypothesis, orthographies differ in two dimensions: “transparency” and “granularity.” Along the transparency dimension, for any orthography whose print-to-sound mapping is directly one-to-one or transparent, Wydell suggests that there will be a reduced possibility of producing phonological dyslexia.

Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological bulletin, 131(1), 3.

The psycholinguistic grain size theory states that the availability of different sound units prior to reading, the degree of consistency seen in the associations between the sounds and the symbols of the language and granularity of the language make up the three contributing factors regarding reading development across languages. However this theory is limited thus far to alphabetic scripts.

Hope this helps.

This is why the DSM IV criteria for Asperger's Disorder were problematic: They were exactly the same as the criteria for Autism, minus the language impairment section (and disallowing any cognitive disability). Even people who don't like the blending of Asperger's into the DSM-5 diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis know that there are differences in the social use of language in Asperger's.

Differences and difficulties include: pragmatics such as how to enter a conversation and have it go back and forth and repair misunderstandings; difficulty integrating verbal and nonverbal strands of information during a conversation (and over time, developing general difficulty with nonverbals such as body language, tone differences that indicate sarcasm, and facial expressions), There are more differences, in each of the categories of social, expressive, and receptive language. Look to some of the literature on Autism, because some of the information you seek might not necessary carry the label of "Asperger's" but instead might be in research for "high-functioning autism" because language issues by definition preclude some researchers who were using the DSM IV, from applying the Asperger's label to their research subjects. That has of course changed with the publication of the DSM-5

I am concerned that your research might be sticking with DSM IV-TR thinking and information, so I'll make sure you consider: Because there is the new diagnosis of Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder, if we are talking about someone with Asperger's/Autism Spectrum Disorder, we should make sure we are talking about someone who also has the second category of symptoms, the restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors (which now includes sensory issues missing from the DSM IV). In the latter case, you're more likely to have the Theory of Mind and central coherence features, due to different brains or different preferences, diverted many kids in the Asperger's region of the autism spectrum from following the neurotypical path of development in the use of language.

Yes, read the recent issue of the journal CORTEX and look for the article on Alzheimer's disease, perseveration and memory, by Miozzo, Fischer-Baum, et al. Also follow up on the citations for the article as well. Hugh Buckingham

A good assessment should begin with a detailed questionnaire about the child's developmental, medical, educational, and family history including the languages the child is exposed to and speaks. This should be followed by informal observation in a couple of different settings and the collection of a naturalistic communication (for nonverbal children) and/or language sample. If a child is school-age, you should be speaking to the teacher or getting the teacher's observations, samples of the child's school work etc... after you have assimilated all of this information, you can decide what standardized tests to administer for the specific population you need. When you're assessing a child with CP who cannot speak for motoric reasons, you need to find a way to adapt the assessment to allow a different response mode - these children have very good comprehension of language but often cannot express what they know due to their motor speech deficits. When assessing children with TBI, you need to work closely with your psychology colleagues to get a good understanding of the cognitive deficits. In designing treatment for any of these population, a functional approach is most effective. Setting intervention goals that are developmental and will meet the functional communication demands of the child's natural environment are crucial.