Information processing by school-age children with specific language impairment: evidence from a modality effect paradigm.

School-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls were tested for immediate recall of digits presented visually, auditorily, or audiovisually. Recall tasks compared speaking and pointing response modalities. Each participant was tested at a level that was consistent with her or his auditory short-term memory span. Traditional effects of primacy, recency, and modality (an auditory recall advantage) were obtained for both groups. The groups performed similarly when audiovisual stimuli were paired with a spoken response, but children with SLI had smaller recency effects together with an unusually poor recall when visually presented items were paired with a pointing response. Such results cannot be explained on the basis of an auditory or speech deficit per se, and suggest that children with SLI have difficulty either retaining or using phonological codes, or both, during tasks that require multiple mental operations. Capacity limitations, involving the rapid decay of phonological representations and/or performance limitations related to the use of less demanding and less effective coding and retrieval strategies, could have contributed to the working memory deficiencies in the children with SLI.

The relationship between middle-class parents' book-sharing discussion and their preschoolers' abstract language development.

Thirty-five mothers and fathers were videotaped in their homes as they read a familiar and unfamiliar book to their preschoolers aged between 3;6 and 4;1. Parental discussions about the text were coded for four levels of abstraction and correlated with children's gains one year later on a formal test of the same four levels of language abstraction (the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument). Parental input at three of the four levels of abstraction was positively and significantly correlated with their children's gains at the highest level of abstraction. This was also the level at which children's scores were the lowest initially and showed the greatest gains. The results suggest that discussions during book reading with preschoolers may be a positive influence, since it was parents' amount of input at lower as well as higher levels of abstraction that correlated with the children's development of more abstract language. We speculate that more input at lower levels might enhance learning by creating a climate of success in allowing children to display mastered skills, whereas more input at higher levels might enhance learning by challenging children with abstract language skills they are just beginning to acquire. In contrast to previous research, these results suggest that there is a great deal of variability in middle-class families in the amount of input that children receive at various level of abstractions during book sharing.

Auditory temporal resolution in specifically language-impaired and age-matched children.

Recently there has been renewed interest in the auditory processing capabilities of children with specific language impairment. In this study, eight children with specific language impairment and eight nonimpaired, age-matched peers completed a task to assess temporal resolution abilities. Children were asked to detect a tone in three masking conditions wherein the masker contained silent gaps of 0 msec., 40 msec., or 64 msec. in duration. Thresholds were measured in each masking condition at 500 Hz and 2000 Hz. Across the groups, thresholds decreased (improved) significantly as a function of increases in the duration of the gaps. Children in the two groups exhibited remarkably similar thresholds for the three masking conditions. However, children with specific language impairment required a significantly greater number of ascending trials to achieve the threshold criterion than did age-matched children. Results suggest that language-impaired children perceive temporal aspects of acoustic stimuli as well as their normally developing peers. Attentional mechanisms may play an important role in the difficulties they exhibit in auditory processing.

Sequential memory in children with and without language impairment.

Serial recall was studied in children with language impairment and two groups of normally achieving controls: a group matched for age and a younger group matched for reading and memory capacity. Participants were presented lists of digits that were one item longer than their memory span, in conditions requiring either written or oral recall. Digit lists were presented either with or without a final nonword item, or "suffix," that was capable of interfering with memory for items at the end of the list. The main finding was that the list-final suffix effect was substantially larger than normal in children with language impairment, even though other aspects of their recall were normal. This deficiency in children with language impairment was evident only under a scoring system that credited recall of items in their correct serial positions, not under scoring systems that credited memory for the presence of items or their sequence. Results are interpreted according to the hypothesis that children with language impairment are more dependent upon relatively unanalyzed acoustic and phonetic representations of speech than are other children.

Spoken and written language relationships in language/learning-impaired and normally achieving school-age children.

Students with language/learning impairment (LLI) and three groups of normally achieving children matched for chronological age, spoken language, and reading abilities wrote and told stories that were analyzed according to a three-dimensional language analysis system. Spoken narratives were linguistically superior to written narratives in many respects. The content of written narratives, however, was organized differently than the content of spoken narratives. Spoken narratives contained more local interconnections than global interconnections; the opposite was true for written narratives. LLI and reading-matched children evidenced speaking-writing relationships that differed from those of the age- and language-matched children in the way language form was organized. Further, LLI children produced more grammatically unacceptable complex T-units in their spoken and written stories than students from any of the three matched groups. The discussion focuses on mechanisms underlying the development of speaking-writing differences and ramifications of spoken-language impairment for spoken and written-language relationships.

Facilitating changes in supervisees' clinical behaviors: an experimental investigation of supervisory effectiveness.

This research was conducted to determine whether supervisees altered their clinical behaviors as a consequence of a joint data-analysis method of clinical supervision. Four beginning graduate student clinicians assigned to articulation clients were supervised in accordance with tenets of Cogan's Clinical Supervision Model and Anderson's Continuum of Supervision. Supervision focused on the targeted dependent variables of clinician "explanations," "informative feedback," and "directive responses to off-task utterances." Visual inspection of multiple baseline data indicated that target behaviors improved after they became the focus of supervision. The supervisory procedures implemented in this study effected positive changes in the supervisees' clinical behaviors. Qualitative discoveries that relate to the practicalities of daily supervision are discussed.

Development of print awareness in language-disordered preschoolers.

This study examined print awareness and related oral language abilities in language-disordered and normally developing preschoolers. Twenty subjects, ages 3:1 to 6:5 (years:months), were shown high frequency environmental print in four conditions varying in the amount of non-print information present in the print setting. They were asked to match the print to the object that it signified and to provide verbal labels for the same objects. Results indicated that normal-language children were responding meaningfully to print settings that contained reduced non-print cues while the language-disordered subjects were not. General language ability was correlated with print awareness, but knowledge of specific oral lexemes was not necessary for accurate print responses. Parent questionnaire data suggested that group differences did not result from differential prior experience with the print items. Results are discussed with reference to hypothesized relationships between oral and written language.