Point-light display: a new tool to improve verb recovery in patients with aphasia? A pilot study.

Some studies have demonstrated that Action Observation (AO) could help patients with aphasia to recover use of verbs. However, the role of kinematics in this effect has remained unknown. The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of a complementary intervention based on the observation of action kinematics in patients with aphasia. Seven aphasic patients (3 males, 4 females) aged between 55 and 88 years participated in the studies. All patients received a classical intervention and an additional, specific intervention based on action observation. This consisted in visualizing a static image or a point-light sequence representing a human action and in trying to name the verb representing the action. In each session, 57 actions were visualized: 19 represented by a static drawing, 19 by a non-focalized point-light sequence, i.e., a point-light display with all dots in white, and 19 by a focalized point-light sequence, i.e., a point-light display (PLD) with the dots corresponding to the main limbs in yellow. Before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the intervention, each patient performed the same denomination task, in which all actions were presented in photographs. The results showed a significant improvement in performance between pre and post-test, but only when the actions were presented in focalized and non-focalized point-light sequences during the intervention. The presentation of action kinematics seems crucial in the recovery of verbs in patients with aphasia. This should be considered by speech therapists in their interventions.

Spelling Errors in French Elementary School Students: A Linguistic Analysis.

PURPOSE: This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the "universality" of POMAS and its suitability to track development in French spelling. METHOD: One hundred ninety-four typically developing French children (Grades 1-5) produced a written narrative and words-to-dictation. These were analyzed for productivity and accuracy. Misspellings were then analyzed using POMAS-FR. RESULTS: Productivity and accuracy were better in the later grades. POMAS-FR provided a novel framework for tracking error types in our French sample. The data showed a linear trend for text production, whereby the proportion of phonological errors decreased rapidly in the early grades, while orthographic errors decreased and morphological errors increased throughout elementary school. Words-to-dictation showed a more stable pattern, with a steady decrease in phonological errors, and a stable proportion of orthographic and morphological errors. The specific error types found within each linguistic category are described for both tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The POMAS-FR allowed for the characterization of linguistic knowledge involved in learning to spell French across elementary school. Interplays between different types of linguistic knowledge were evident at all grades. In comparison with other writing systems, French text spelling competence relied heavily on morphological knowledge. These results suggest POMAS may be applied to other orthographic systems. It also highlights the importance of task and word selection for the qualitative evaluation of spelling. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20520774.

Focus on the Narrative Skills of Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder and High Functioning Autism.

Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children's daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA). Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience. Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises). Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives. Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.

Capturing the Nature of the Spelling Errors in Developmental Language Disorder: A Scoping Review.

Purpose This scoping review aims to identify and analyze the nature of the spelling errors produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different orthographies. Building on a previous meta-analysis identifying the extent of the spelling difficulties of children with DLD, the review extends our understanding of the nature of the spelling errors produced by children with DLD. Three questions are addressed: Do spelling difficulties in children with DLD stem from weak phonological, orthographic, or morphological representations? What are the patterns of spelling performance in DLD depending on orthographic depth? Do comorbid difficulties with DLD impact spelling? Method The scoping review followed the five phases outlined by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and extended by Levac et al. (2010): (a) specifying the research question; (b) identifying relevant studies; (c) selecting studies; (d) charting the data; and (e) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results. Results Eighteen studies that provided a qualitative description of the nature of spelling errors produced by children and adolescents with DLD were identified. Spelling performance was examined in relation to control groups that were matched on age, on language features (language, spelling, or reading age), or on co-occurring difficulties. Conclusions This review article highlights the key elements that need to be considered when practitioners examine spelling difficulties and provides benchmarks for assessment in a range of alphabetic languages for school-age children. The qualitative analyses indicated that when practitioners evaluate spelling performance in children or adolescents with DLD, three factors should be considered: phonological representations, morphological awareness, and reading skills.

Reduced deficits observed in children and adolescents with developmental language disorder using proper nonverbalizable span tasks.

BACKGROUND: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD)-previously called Specific Language Impairment (SLI)-often perform poorly in verbal working memory (WM) tasks, but the picture is less clear regarding their visuospatial WM capacity. Recent research has been inconclusive regarding whether visuospatial working memory is impaired in DLD. Additionally, it is still unclear whether the putative disparity of WM performance persists in adolescence. AIMS: The aim of the current study was to unveil potential impairments in verbal and visuospatial working memory in DLD by exploring two developmental age groups of French-speaking children and adolescents. METHODS: This study examined verbal and nonverbal short-term and working memory capacity using digit span and Corsi block tasks in twelve children (7-11-year-olds) and twelve adolescents (12-18-year-olds) with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to that in their typically developing peers. RESULTS: Our findings showed that both children and adolescents with DLD have deficits in storage and processing ability for the verbal domain. However, both the short-term and working memory estimates of immediate capacity for visuospatial information in adolescents with DLD were virtually intact. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that both verbal and nonverbal storage and processing capacity are largely modulated by age, suggesting that the children with DLD show virtually intact nonverbal working memory capacity as they reach adolescence.

Lower verbalizability of visual stimuli modulates differences in estimates of working memory capacity between children with and without developmental language disorders.

Background and aims: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often perform below their typically developing peers on verbal memory tasks. However, the picture is less clear on visual memory tasks. Research has generally shown that visual memory can be facilitated by verbal representations, but few studies have been conducted using visual materials that are not easy to verbalize. Therefore, we attempted to construct non-verbalizable stimuli to investigate the impact of working memory capacity. Method and results: We manipulated verbalizability in visual span tasks and tested whether minimizing verbalizability could help reduce visual recall performance differences across children with and without developmental language disorder. Visuals that could be easily verbalized or not were selected based on a pretest with non-developmental language disorder young adults. We tested groups of children with developmental language disorder (N = 23) and their typically developing peers (N = 65) using these high and low verbalizable classes of visual stimuli. The memory span of the children with developmental language disorder varied across the different stimulus conditions, but critically, although their storage capacity for visual information was virtually unimpaired, the children with developmental language disorder still had difficulty in recalling verbalizable images with simple drawings. Also, recalling complex (galaxy) images with low verbalizability proved difficult in both groups of children. An item-based analysis on correctly recalled items showed that higher levels of verbalizability enhanced visual recall in the typically developing children to a greater extent than the children with developmental language disorder.Conclusions and clinical implication: We suggest that visual short-term memory in typically developing children might be mediated with verbal encoding to a larger extent than in children with developmental language disorder, thus leading to poorer performance on visual capacity tasks. Our findings cast doubts on the idea that short-term storage impairments are limited to the verbal domain, but they also challenge the idea that visual tasks are essentially visual. Therefore, our findings suggest to clinicians working with children experiencing developmental language difficulties that visual memory deficits may not necessarily be due to reduced non-verbal skills but may be due to the high amount of verbal cues in visual stimuli, from which they do not benefit in comparison to their peers.

The management of cohesion in written narratives in students with specific language impairment: Differences between childhood and adolescence.

The goal of this study was to investigate the management of cohesion by children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) when writing a narrative in a communicative situation. Twelve children with SLI (from 7 to 11 years old) and 12 adolescents with SLI (from 12 to 18 years old) were chronological age-matched with 24 typically developing (TD) children and 24 TD adolescents. All participants attended mainstream classes: children in elementary schools and adolescents in middle and high schools. Analyses of cohesion focused on both density and diversity of connectives, punctuation marks and anaphors. Results attested that children with SLI were greatly impaired in their management of written cohesion and used specific forms previously observed in narrative speech such as left dislocations. By contrast, and not expected, the management of written cohesion by adolescents with SLI was close to that of their TD peers. The communicative writing situation we set up, which engaged participants to take into account the addressee, also made possible for adolescents with SLI to manage cohesion in writing.

Lexical spelling in children and adolescents with specific language impairment: variations with the writing situation.

The goal of this study was to compare the lexical spelling performance of children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) in two contrasting writing situations: a dictation of isolated words (a classic evaluative situation) and a narrative of a personal event (a communicative situation). Twenty-four children with SLI and 48 typically developing children participated in the study, split into two age groups: 7-11 and 12-18 years of age. Although participants with SLI made more spelling errors per word than typically developing participants of the same chronological age, there was a smaller difference between the two groups in the narratives than in the dictations. Two of the findings are particularly noteworthy: (1) Between 12 and 18 years of age, in communicative narration, the number of spelling errors of the SLI group was not different from that of the typically developing group. (2) In communicative narration, the participants with SLI did not make specific spelling errors (phonologically unacceptable), contrary to what was shown in the dictation. From an educational perspective or that of a remediation program, it must be stressed that the communicative narration provides children-and especially adolescents-with SLI an opportunity to demonstrate their improved lexical spelling abilities. Furthermore, the results encourage long-term lexical spelling education, as adolescents with SLI continue to show improvement between 12 and 18 years of age.