Empirical Implications of Matching Children With Specific Language Impairment to Children With Typical Development on Nonverbal IQ.

This study determined the effect of matching children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their peers with typical development (TD) for nonverbal IQ on the IQ test scores of the resultant groups. Studies published between January 2000 and May 2012 reporting standard nonverbal IQ scores for SLI and age-matched TD controls were categorized into those that matched and did not match children with SLI and TD on nonverbal IQ. We then compared the nonverbal IQ scores across matching criterions within each diagnostic category. In studies that matched children on nonverbal IQ, children with SLI scored significantly higher on nonverbal IQ tests relative to children with SLI in studies that did not match on this criterion. Therefore, it appears that the nonverbal IQ performance of children with SLI is not comparable across studies that do and do not match samples on nonverbal IQ. This suggests that the practice of nonverbal IQ matching may have unintended consequences for the generalization of research findings to the broader SLI population.

Focused stimulation for a child with autism spectrum disorder: a treatment study.

This study explored the use of focused stimulation as an intervention technique for a three-year-old boy diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). His parents were trained to use focused stimulation to facilitate comprehension of what is x doing question forms. Responses to question probes were collected at both pre- and post-treatment intervals. At the beginning of the study, the child did not respond correctly to any of the target questions. Following intervention, the child made significant gains towards the target goal, but little change towards a control goal used for comparison. These findings provide preliminary support for the usefulness of focused stimulation as an intervention strategy for at least some children with ASD.

Do children with Down syndrome have difficulty with argument structure?

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome (DS) and seven typically developing children with comparable mean length of utterance (MLU) levels were examined for their use of verb argument structure. The children's production of subject arguments, direct object arguments, and inappropriate use of arguments (anomalies) were compared for each group. When compared across verb category, the results of this study revealed no significant group differences for the omission of subject arguments. However, when arguments for transitive verb productions were compared, the children with DS were more likely to omit subject arguments in comparison to direct object arguments. In addition, the normal control group was more likely to use anomalous argument patterns than the children with DS. These findings suggest that syntactic difficulties that are characteristic of children with DS may delay them in overcoming the optional subject (OS) phenomena (Ingham, 1992). A greater number of anomalous arguments used by the normal children suggests an inadequate knowledge of argument structure at this stage of language development. As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to describe the relationship between syntax and semantics as it applies to the knowledge of verbs in children with Down syndrome.

Phonological priming in adults who stutter.

UNLABELLED: The purpose of this study was to compare the speed of phonological encoding between adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS). Fifteen male AWS and 15 age- and gender-matched ANS participated in the study. Speech onset latency was obtained for both groups and stuttering frequency was calculated for AWS during three phonological priming tasks: (1) heterogeneous, during which the participants' single-word verbal responses differed phonemically; (2) C-homogeneous, during which the participants' response words shared the initial consonant; and (3) CV-homogeneous, during which the participants' response words shared the initial consonant and vowel. Response words containing the same C and CV patterns in the two homogeneous conditions served as phonological primes for one another, while the response words in the heterogeneous condition did not. During each task, the participants produced a verbal response after being visually presented with a semantically related cue word, with cue-response pairs being learned beforehand. The data showed that AWS had significantly longer speech onset latency when compared to ANS in all priming conditions, priming had a facilitating effect on word retrieval for both groups, and there was no significant change in stuttering frequency across the conditions for AWS. This suggests that phonological encoding may play no role, or only a minor role, in stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) describe previous research paradigms that have been used to assess phonological encoding in adults and children who stutter; (2) explain performance similarities and differences between adults who do and do not stutter during various phonological priming conditions; (3) compare the present findings to past research that examined the relationship between phonological encoding and stuttering.

The omission of subject arguments in children with specific language impairment.

Ten children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to two groups of normally developing children for the production of grammatical subjects in sentences of varying length and argument structure complexity. The normal controls consisted of a group of younger children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU) and a group matched for chronological age. The participants were asked to produce sentences of varied argument structure complexity using a story completion task. The results indicated that both the children with SLI and the MLU controls omitted more subject arguments in the ditransitive sentences than in sentences with intransitive and ditransitive verbs. In addition, more children with SLI omitted subject arguments as linguistic complexity increased. This effect was not found for the normal age control children who never omitted subjects, regardless of increases in argument structure complexity. These results support the notion that grammatical errors in both children with SLI and their younger, normal counterparts may be due to problems with processing complex linguistic information rather than with limitations in linguistic knowledge.

Lexical verb diversity in children with Down syndrome.

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome and seven typically developing children matched for comparable MLU levels were compared for several measures of lexical diversity. These measures were percentage of utterances containing lexical verbs, number of verb tokens produced, a mean number of verbs per utterance (MVU), number of verb types used, and number of mental state verbs used. The results of this study indicated that the children with Down syndrome produced lexical verbs as frequently as their normally developing counterparts. In contrast, the children with Down syndrome were found to produce a larger variety of lexical verbs. An examination of a subset of verbs indicated that both groups of children produced an equal number of mental state verbs. These results support previous findings that when compared to syntactic development, children with Down syndrome show a relative area of strength in expressive vocabulary.