ABSTRACT
Telepractice has emerged as a form of service delivery to assess and treat individuals with communication disorders. The present study surveyed speech-language pathologists and audiologists in India about the use of telepractice. Two hundred and five (N=205) speech-language pathologists and audiologists responded to a questionnaire, with 12.19% reporting their use of telepractice to deliver clinical services. Respondents also indicated an urgent shortage of professionals in India to deliver clinical services in speech-language pathology and audiology, and opined that these needs can be met via the use of telepractice. India is well known throughout the world for the advanced application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), with 931.95 million telephone subscribers, over 900 million mobile phone users, and the second-largest mobile phone usage in the world. India has also experienced a tremendous rise in the number of internet users. Therefore, India is well poised to fully develop telepractice to overcome the barriers of distance and amplify the availability of speech-language pathology, audiology and other healthcare services. But first, the widespread use of telepractice throughout the nation will require an improved infrastructure (e.g., to uphold privacy and security); training for professionals; and telepractice policies. While very promising, the deployment of telepractice throughout India will require the attention of policy makers and government organizations.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language acquisition in the absence of frank neurological damage, hearing deficits, severe environmental deprivation, or mental retardation. Children with SLI have significant difficulties in syntax domain of language compared to semantics, while their acquisition of pragmatics is relatively spared. PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study is to examine the judgment and revision of inflectional and derivational morphemes of children with specific language impairment (SLI). METHODS: 31 children with SLI and 33 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study (age range 8-13 years). The stimuli consisted of 18 sentences with inflectional morphemes and 18 sentences with derivational morphemes for grammatical judgment and revision tasks. Inflectional and derivational performance of SLI group was compared with TD group on judgment and revision scores. RESULTS: Children with SLI were significantly poorer compared to TD children on inflectional operations (invariably on judging & revising) but performed like TD children on derivational morphemes. Within SLI, inflectional performance was significantly poorer than derivational performance. In contrast, TD children performed better on inflections than derivations. Findings supported the predictions and discussed using possible sequencing problems in children with SLI. CONCLUSION: The study describes the findings using sequential difficulties reported by procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) in SLI.
ABSTRACT
Procedural deficit hypothesis claims that language deficit in children with specific language impairment is affiliated to sequence learning problems. However, studies did not explore on aspects of grammar vulnerable to sequence learning deficits. The present study makes predictions for aspects of grammar that could be sensitive to procedural deficits based on core ideas of procedural deficit hypothesis. The hypothesis for the present study was that the grammatical operations that require greater sequencing abilities (such as inflectional operations) would be more affected in children with language impairment. Further, the influence of sequencing difficulties would be even greater in agglutinating inflectional languages. An adapted serial reaction time task for sequence learning measurements along with grammatical tasks on derivation, inflection, and sentence complexity were examined on typically developing and language impaired children. Results were in favor of procedural deficit hypothesis and its close relation to non-adjacent grammatical operations. The findings were discussed using procedural deficits, declarative compensatory mechanism, and statistical learning deficits.
