Early speech and language intervention in Brazilian-Portuguese toddlers with cleft lip and/or palate.

Young children with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CL/P) are at risk for early vocabulary and speech sound production delays. Early intervention studies have shown some promising findings to promote early speech and vocabulary development following palate repair; however, we know little about how these interventions can be used in other international contexts. This study adapted an early speech and language intervention developed in the US, Enhanced Milieu Teaching with Phonological Emphasis (EMT+PE), to the Brazilian context at the Hospital for Rehabilitation of Craniofacial Anomalies at the University of São Paulo-Bauru. The purpose of this study was to compare the speech and language performance of 24 toddlers with CL/P randomized into an EMT+PE intervention group and a business-as-usual (BAU) comparison group over three time points: prior to, immediately following, and three months after intervention. Results immediately following intervention indicate gains in multiple measures of language. Three months following intervention, participants showed gains in both language and speech measures.

Corpus-Based Transitivity Biases in Individuals with Aphasia.

BACKGROUND: This study investigated whether individuals with aphasia (IWA) retain verb biases in expressive language. Verb biases refer to the likelihood that a given verb will occur in different sentence structures. We focused on the likelihood of verbs occurring in transitive and intransitive structures. AIMS: The main goal of this study was to determine whether IWA and controls show similar verb biases or whether IWA show a preference for transitive or intransitive structures that supersedes individual verb biases. We also investigated whether IWA show a preference for intransitively or transitively biased verbs, whether verb biases differ as a function of aphasia type, and how verb bias affects errors in IWA's speech production. METHODS: The current study analyzed 236 transcribed interviews of IWA from AphasiaBank. All uses of 54 verbs were coded based on the sentence structure and the presence of errors. We report data from 11 transitively biased and 11 intransitively biased verbs. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: IWA's transitivity biases were indistinguishable from controls' biases. In addition, IWA produced more intransitively biased verbs than transitively biased verbs overall. In ungrammatical productions, IWA's error rates were higher in sentence structures that conflicted with verb bias and highest when an intransitively biased verb was attempted in a transitive structure. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicate that IWA are sensitive to verb bias and verb complexity within expressive language. The effects are consistent with previous literature concerning IWA's sensitivity to verb bias in receptive language tasks and to verb complexity in verb retrieval tasks.

The Role of Socioeconomic Status in the Narrative Story Retells of School-Aged English Language Learners.

Purpose: We examined the relationship between maternal level of education as an index of socioeconomic status (SES) on the narrative story retells of school-aged children who are English language learners (ELLs) to guide interpretation of results. Method: Using data available from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts database (Miller & Iglesias, 2012), we were able to compare the language samples of 907 ELL students in kindergarten and 2nd grade whose parents had different levels of education. We used a simple linear regression to see if maternal level of education was predictive of measures of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative structure in Spanish and English narrative story retells. Results: There were no differences in language measures between children from different SES backgrounds for the Spanish language samples. There were differences with the English language samples in four of the five measures for the kindergarten sample and only three of five measures for the older children, with a smaller percentage of the variance explained. Conclusion: Despite common knowledge that SES has a negative influence on language, the actual influence on the narrative productions of school-aged ELLs was less than anticipated for English and absent for Spanish. The implications for assessment are discussed and concluded.