Word Learning With Orthographic Support in Nonspeaking and Minimally Speaking School-Age Autistic Children.

PURPOSE: Previous research has demonstrated that typically developing children, verbal children with a diagnosis of autism, children with Down syndrome, children with developmental language disorder, and children with dyslexia can all benefit from orthographic support during word learning tasks. This study sought to determine if minimally speaking or nonspeaking children with a diagnosis of autism would also demonstrate an orthographic facilitation effect during a computer-based remote word learning task. METHOD: Twenty-two school-age children with a diagnosis of autism and little to no spoken language learned four novel words by contrasting the words with known objects. Two novel words were taught with orthographic support present, and two were taught without orthographic support. Participants were exposed to the words a total of 12 times and then given an immediate posttest to assess identification. Parent report measures of receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, autism symptomatology, and reading skills were also collected. RESULTS: During learning tasks, participants performed equally well whether orthographic support was given or not. For the posttest, however, participants performed significantly better for words that were taught with orthographic support. The presence of orthography improved accuracy and supported a greater number of participants to reach the passing criterion compared to the absence of orthography. Orthographic representations aided the word learning of those with lower expressive language significantly more than those with higher expressive language. CONCLUSIONS: Minimally speaking or nonspeaking children with a diagnosis of autism benefit from orthographic support when learning new words. Further investigation is warranted to determine if this effect holds during face-to-face interactions using augmentative and alternative communication systems. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22465492.

Language intervention in bilingual children with developmental language disorder: A systematic review.

BACKGROUND: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific domains, such as phonology, vocabulary, morphosyntax and literacy. AIMS: To examine evidence for language intervention and cross-language transfer effects in bilingual children with DLD. Specifically, the study aimed to review intervention evidence targeting non-linguistic cognitive skills and six areas of language: phonology, vocabulary, morphosyntax, pragmatics, narrative skills and literacy. METHODS & PROCEDURES: We carried out searches in five electronic databases: CINAHL, Scopus, Psychinfo, Proquest and Sciencedirect. Data from selected papers were extracted and organized into the three following categories: study information, participant information and intervention information. Critical appraisal for selected papers was conducted using a quality assessment tool (QAT). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: We included 14 papers in the review. The majority indicated evidence for vocabulary intervention. There was limited evidence for intervention targeting phonology or morphosyntax. Cross-language generalization effects were evident for vocabulary, but in some instances also reported for morphosyntax and literacy. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The present review indicates that there is a significant gap in the literature regarding language intervention for several key language areas such as morphosyntax, narrative skills and literacy. There are only limited data for the effects of cross-language generalization indicating that more research is needed in this area specifically for skills beyond vocabulary. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Previous studies have examined the effects of bi- and monolingual intervention in bilingual children with DLD. Although the results indicated superior effects for bilingual compared with monolingual intervention, language intervention evidence in specific language domains (e.g., vocabulary, literacy) has not been investigated. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study will add intervention evidence specific to language domains such as phonology, vocabulary, morphosyntax, pragmatics, narrative skills and literacy. Additionally, we have synthesized intervention evidence on non-linguistic cognition given that these skills are often impaired in bilingual children with DLD. The review has also demonstrated evidence for the effects of cross-language transfer beyond vocabulary skills, especially when the intervention was provided in the home language. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Although there was a lack of intervention evidence in language domains such as pragmatics, the results indicated some evidence for intervention targeting vocabulary. However, positive effects of cross-language generalization were not constrained to vocabulary but were also reported for intervention targeting mean length of utterance and literacy in the home language. This result indicates an interactive nature of the two languages, as well as provides further evidence for supporting home language(s) in intervention. Finally, intervention targeting non-linguistic cognition may yield additional cross-domain generalization to language skills specifically for bilingual children with DLD.

Longitudinal Social and Communication Outcomes in Children with Autism Raised in Bi/Multilingual Environments.

Globally, there are more bilingual speakers than monolingual speakers; however, scant research evidence exists regarding social communication development and outcomes for bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A stronger evidence base will facilitate health professionals and educators providing accurate recommendations regarding language use. This study employed a longitudinal cohort design to compare social and communication skills, at baseline and over 12 months, for 60 monolingual and 60 bilingual children with ASD receiving community based early intervention. We found few differences at intake, and no difference in the magnitude of change over 12 months for this cohort. Findings support the notion that there is no basis on which to discourage home language use with bilingual children with ASD.

Orthographic Support for Word Learning in Clinical Populations: A Systematic Review.

Purpose A systematic review was performed to determine the extent to which orthographic facilitation, a strategy to improve word learning, has been demonstrated in the literature for children and adolescents from clinical categories such as developmental language disorders (DLD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Down syndrome, dyslexia, hearing impairment, intellectual disability, and cerebral palsy. Method Five databases were searched for all studies published through December 2019. Eligible studies included participants from a clinical population (DLD, ASD, dyslexia, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, hearing impairment, etc.) and compared word learning with and without orthography. Selected studies were extracted for pertinent information. In addition, assessment of the methodological rigor was performed for each study. Results The review yielded five studies that targeted word learning with orthographic facilitation for children from various clinical populations including DLD, verbal children with autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia. All studied populations showed a benefit for word learning in picture naming posttests when words were trained in the presence of orthography. Conclusions For the studied populations, training words in the presence of orthography will improve word learning accuracy and retention. The review highlights the need for more research in this area across other clinical populations. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14632791.

Rhyme Awareness in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Exploratory Study.

Phonological awareness is a critical component of phonological processing that predicts children's literacy outcomes. Phonological awareness skills enable children to think about the sound structure of words and facilitates decoding and the analysis of words during spelling. Past research has shown that children's vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity are associated with their phonological awareness skills. Linguistic characteristics of words, such as phonological neighborhood density and orthography congruency have also been found to influence children's performance in phonological awareness tasks. Literacy is a difficult area for deaf and hard of hearing children, who have poor phonological awareness skills. Although cochlear implantation (CI) has been found to improve these children's speech and language outcomes, limited research has investigated phonological awareness in children with CI. Rhyme awareness is the first level of phonological awareness to develop in children with normal hearing (NH). The current study investigates whether rhyme awareness in children with NH (n = 15, median age = 5; 5, IQR = 11 ms) and a small group of children with CI (n = 6, median age = 6; 11.5, IQR = 3.75 ms) is associated with individual differences in vocabulary and working memory. Using a rhyme oddity task, well-controlled for perceptual similarity, we also explored whether children's performance was associated with linguistic characteristics of the task items (e.g., rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency). Results indicate that there is an association between vocabulary and working memory and performance in a rhyme awareness task in NH children. Only working memory was correlated with rhyme awareness performance in CI children. Linguistic characteristics of the task items, on the other hand, were not found to be associated with success. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed.

Error Type and Lexical Frequency Effects: Error Detection in Swedish Children With Language Impairment.

Purpose: The first aim of this study was to investigate if Swedish-speaking school-age children with language impairment (LI) show specific morphosyntactic vulnerabilities in error detection. The second aim was to investigate the effects of lexical frequency on error detection, an overlooked aspect of previous error detection studies. Method: Error sensitivity for grammatical structures vulnerable in Swedish-speaking preschool children with LI (omission of the indefinite article in a noun phrase with a neuter/common noun, and use of the infinitive instead of past-tense regular and irregular verbs) was compared to a control error (singular noun instead of plural). Target structures involved a high-frequency (HF) or a low-frequency (LF) noun/verb. Grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were presented in headphones, and responses were collected through button presses. Results: Children with LI had similar sensitivity to the plural control error as peers with typical language development, but lower sensitivity to past-tense errors and noun phrase errors. All children showed lexical frequency effects for errors involving verbs (HF > LF), and noun gender effects for noun phrase errors (common > neuter). Conclusions: School-age children with LI may have subtle difficulties with morphosyntactic processing that mirror expressive difficulties in preschool children with LI. Lexical frequency may affect morphosyntactic processing, which has clinical implications for assessment of grammatical knowledge.

Referential communication abilities in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.

PURPOSE: This study describes the performance on a perspective- and role-taking task in 27 children, ages 6-13 years, with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS). A cross-cultural design comparing Dutch- and English-speaking children with 22q11.2DS explored the possibility of cultural differences. METHOD: Chronologically age-matched and younger typically developing (TD) children matched for receptive vocabulary served as control groups to identify challenges in referential communication. RESULTS: The utterances of children with 22q11.2DS were characterised as short and simple in lexical and grammatical terms. However, from a language use perspective, their utterances were verbose, ambiguous and irrelevant given the pictured scenes. They tended to elaborate on visual details and conveyed off-topic, extraneous information when participating in a barrier-game procedure. Both types of aberrant utterances forced a listener to consistently infer the intended message. Moreover, children with 22q11.2DS demonstrated difficulty selecting correct speech acts in accordance with contextual cues during a role-taking task. CONCLUSION: Both English- and Dutch-speaking children with 22q11.2DS showed impoverished information transfer and an increased number of elaborations, suggesting a cross-cultural syndrome-specific feature.

Nonword Repetition and Speech Motor Control in Children.

This study examined how familiarity of word structures influenced articulatory control in children and adolescents during repetition of real words (RWs) and nonwords (NWs). A passive reflective marker system was used to track articulator movement. Measures of accuracy were obtained during repetition of RWs and NWs, and kinematic analysis of movement duration and variability was conducted. Participants showed greater consonant and vowel accuracy during RW than NW repetition. Jaw movement duration was longer in NWs compared to RWs across age groups, and younger children produced utterances with longer jaw movement duration compared to older children. Jaw movement variability was consistently greater during repetition of NWs than RWs in both groups of participants. The results indicate that increases in phonological short-term memory demands affect articulator movement. This effect is most pronounced in younger children. A range of skills may develop during childhood, which supports NW repetition skills.

Narrative skills in Swedish children with language impairment.

UNLABELLED: This study investigated the development of narrative skills in Swedish children with language impairment between age 5 and age 10. Seventeen children with LI and two control groups of age peers with typical development participated in a picture elicited story telling task. Analyses included measures of story content, cohesion and grammar. Our subjects showed development in different areas from age 5 to 10, but they did not perform at the level of the controls at age 10 on number of different verbs used and percent grammatically correct C-units. We conclude that preschool children with LI develop in their narrative skills over time, but not to the level of their age-peers at age 10. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will be able to describe areas of vulnerability in Swedish-speaking children with language impairment in general, and related to narration in particular. Furthermore, the reader will be able to describe similarities in narrative skills between Swedish-speaking and English-speaking children with language impairment.

Production and perception of metrical patterns in Swedish children with language impairment.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between perception and production of metrical patterns in Swedish children with language impairment (LI), in order to add to the knowledge on underlying explanations of LI. A further aim was to explore whether omissions are mainly related to prosodic aspects or to linguistic function. Children with LI omitted significantly more unstressed syllables than did children with typical language development. Exploration of the relationship between perception and production of phrasal stress patterns demonstrated that children with LI might be divided into three subgroups: Group a: children who perform better on perception than production; Group b: children who perform better on production than perception; and Group c: children with rather poor results on both perception and production.