Five Additional Evidence-Based Principles to Facilitate Grammar Development for Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

PURPOSE: Because the development of grammatical forms is difficult for many children with developmental language disorder (DLD), language interventions often focus on supporting children's use of grammatical language. This article proposes five additional principles to those suggested by Fey et al. (2003) to facilitate the development of grammatical forms by children with DLD. Three of the five additional principles address the selection and presentation of linguistic contexts to be used with target grammatical forms (Principles 11-13); two principles encourage the incorporation of additional intervention components: auditory bombardment and explicit instruction (Principles 14 and 15, respectively). METHOD: We present empirical evidence and, when available, describe the theoretical motivations to support each of the five additional principles. We then describe how we have integrated the five principles into 20- to 30-min intervention sessions that target regular past tense -ed, third-person singular -s, present progressive is/are verb+ing, or do/does questions for 4- to 8-year-olds with DLD. Each session includes four activities: sentence imitation, story retell, structured play, and auditory bombardment. We provide details of each activity, relevant materials, and illustrative examples that highlight the incorporation of each of the principles. RESULTS: When targeting the development of grammatical forms in intervention, current evidence supports the use of a high degree of linguistic variability (Principle 11), the presentation of target forms in contexts that vary in difficulty (Principle 12), the presentation of target forms in sentences that vary in syntactic structure (Principle 13), the use of auditory bombardment (Principle 14), and the incorporation of explicit instruction (Principle 15). Clinicians can use these principles when targeting a range of grammatical forms in relatively short intervention sessions comprising a variety of activities. CONCLUSIONS: This article encourages the employment of five additional principles into grammatical language intervention. Descriptions, materials, and examples demonstrate how the principles can all be addressed within a single intervention session.

Relating Acoustic Measures to Listener Ratings of Children's Productions of Word-Initial /ɹ/ and /w/.

PURPOSE: The /ɹ/ productions of young children acquiring American English are highly variable and often inaccurate, with [w] as the most common substitution error. One acoustic indicator of the goodness of children's /ɹ/ productions is the difference between the frequency of the second formant (F2) and the third formant (F3), with a smaller F3-F2 difference being associated with a perceptually more adultlike /ɹ/. This study analyzed the effectiveness of automatically extracted F3-F2 differences in characterizing young children's productions of /ɹ/-/w/ in comparison with manually coded measurements. METHOD: Automated F3-F2 differences were extracted from productions of a variety of different /ɹ/- and /w/-initial words spoken by 3- to 4-year-old monolingual preschoolers (N = 117; 2,278 tokens in total). These automated measures were compared to ratings of the phoneme goodness of children's productions as rated by untrained adult listeners (n = 132) on a visual analog scale, as well as to narrow transcriptions of the production into four categories: [ɹ], [w], and two intermediate categories. RESULTS: Data visualizations show a weak relationship between automated F3-F2 differences with listener ratings and narrow transcriptions. Mixed-effects models suggest the automated F3-F2 difference only modestly predicts listener ratings (R 2 = .37) and narrow transcriptions (R 2 = .32). CONCLUSION: The weak relationship between automated F3-F2 difference and both listener ratings and narrow transcriptions suggests that these automated acoustic measures are of questionable reliability and utility in assessing preschool children's mastery of the /ɹ/-/w/ contrast.

Verbs Matter: A Tutorial for Determining Verb Difficulty.

PURPOSE: Research indicates that when teaching grammatical forms to children, the verbs used to model specific grammatical inflections matter. When learning grammatical forms, children have higher performance when they hear many unique verb forms that vary in their frequency and phonological complexity. In this tutorial, we demonstrate a method for identifying and characterizing a large number of verbs based on their frequency and complexity. METHOD: We selected verbs from an open-access database of transcribed child language samples. We extracted verbs produced by 5- to 8.9-year-old children in four morphosyntactic contexts: regular past tense -ed, third person singular -s, is/are + verb+ing, and do/does questions. We ranked verbs based on their frequency of occurrence across transcripts. We also coded the phonological complexity of each verb. We coded each verb as high or low frequency and high or low phonological complexity. RESULTS: The synthesis yielded 129 unique verbs used in the regular past tense -ed context, 107 verbs used in the third person singular -s context, 69 verbs used in the is/are + verb+ing context, and 16 verbs used in the do/does question context. We created tables for each form that include the frequency rankings and phonological complexity scores for every verb. CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians may use the verb lists, frequency ratings, and phonological complexity scores to help identify verbs to incorporate into assessment and intervention sessions with children. Researchers and clinicians may use the step-by-step approach presented in the tutorial to identify verbs or other syntactic components used in different morphosyntactic contexts or produced by individuals of different demographics in different speaking contexts.

Different neural processes underlie visual speech perception in school-age children and adults: An event-related potentials study.

The ability to use visual speech cues does not fully develop until late adolescence. The cognitive and neural processes underlying this slow maturation are not yet understood. We examined electrophysiological responses of younger (8-9 years) and older (11-12 years) children as well as adults elicited by visually perceived articulations in an audiovisual word matching task and related them to the amount of benefit gained during a speech-in-noise (SIN) perception task when seeing the talker's face. On each trial, participants first heard a word and, after a short pause, saw a speaker silently articulate a word. In half of the trials the articulated word matched the auditory word (congruent trials), whereas in the other half it did not (incongruent trials). In all three age groups, incongruent articulations elicited the N400 component and congruent articulations elicited the late positive complex (LPC). Groups did not differ in the mean amplitude of N400. The mean amplitude of LPC was larger in younger children compared with older children and adults. Importantly, the relationship between event-related potential measures and SIN performance varied by group. In 8- and 9-year-olds, neither component was predictive of SIN gain. The LPC amplitude predicted the SIN gain in older children but not in adults. Conversely, the N400 amplitude predicted the SIN gain in adults. We argue that although all groups were able to detect correspondences between auditory and visual word onsets at the phonemic/syllabic level, only adults could use this information for lexical access.