Focus on the Narrative Skills of Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder and High Functioning Autism.

Purpose: Narratives of personal experiences emerge early in language acquisition and are particularly commonly experienced in children's daily lives. To produce these stories, children need to develop narrative, linguistic, and social-cognitive skills. Research has shown that these skills are impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and high functioning autism (HFA). Aim: This study aimed to determine whether narrative skills are still impaired in adolescence and to highlight the language similarities and differences between teenagers with DLD and HFA in the production of a narrative of a personal experience. Method: Ten teenagers with DLD, 10 teenagers with HFA and 10 typically developing (TD) teenagers, matched on chronological age, told a narrative of a personal experience. These stories were analyzed to evaluate narrative skills through coherence (respect of the narrative schema) and cohesion (anaphora and connectors) and social-cognitive skills (affective and cognitive mental states of the characters, and arbitrary vocalizations such as voice noises). Results: Teenagers with DLD were less compliant with the complication step in the narrative schema than teenagers with HFA or TD. No difference was observed between the three groups of teenagers in terms of cohesion or regarding the positive and negative social-cognitive skills used in narratives. Conclusion: When producing a narrative of a personal experience, HFA teens do not have difficulties neither with narrative skills and with social-cognitive skills assessed in this paper. In DLD the profile of the teens is not the same: They do not have difficulties with social-cognitive skills and with a part of narrative skills (cohesion), and they have difficulties with the narrative schema.

Capturing the Nature of the Spelling Errors in Developmental Language Disorder: A Scoping Review.

Purpose This scoping review aims to identify and analyze the nature of the spelling errors produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different orthographies. Building on a previous meta-analysis identifying the extent of the spelling difficulties of children with DLD, the review extends our understanding of the nature of the spelling errors produced by children with DLD. Three questions are addressed: Do spelling difficulties in children with DLD stem from weak phonological, orthographic, or morphological representations? What are the patterns of spelling performance in DLD depending on orthographic depth? Do comorbid difficulties with DLD impact spelling? Method The scoping review followed the five phases outlined by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and extended by Levac et al. (2010): (a) specifying the research question; (b) identifying relevant studies; (c) selecting studies; (d) charting the data; and (e) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results. Results Eighteen studies that provided a qualitative description of the nature of spelling errors produced by children and adolescents with DLD were identified. Spelling performance was examined in relation to control groups that were matched on age, on language features (language, spelling, or reading age), or on co-occurring difficulties. Conclusions This review article highlights the key elements that need to be considered when practitioners examine spelling difficulties and provides benchmarks for assessment in a range of alphabetic languages for school-age children. The qualitative analyses indicated that when practitioners evaluate spelling performance in children or adolescents with DLD, three factors should be considered: phonological representations, morphological awareness, and reading skills.

Promoting Third Graders' Executive Functions and Literacy: A Pilot Study Examining the Benefits of Mindfulness vs. Relaxation Training.

Research suggested that developing mindfulness skills in children improves proximal outcomes, such as attention and executive functions, as well as distal outcomes, such as academic achievement. Despite empirical evidence supporting this claim, research on the benefits of mindfulness training in child populations is scarce, with some mixed findings in the field. Here, we aimed to fill in this gap, by examining the effects of a mindfulness training on third graders' proximal and distal outcomes, namely, attention and executive functions (viz., inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) as well as literacy-related achievement (viz., handwriting fluency, text quality, Portuguese grades). These outcomes were measured with behavioral tasks and teacher ratings. Sixty-six Portuguese children were randomly allocated to an experimental group receiving mindfulness training (n = 29) or an active control group receiving relaxation training (n = 37). Both training programs were implemented by psychologists in two 30-min weekly sessions for 8 weeks. All students were assessed before and after the interventions. Three main findings are noteworthy: (a) mindfulness training enhanced teacher-rated cognitive flexibility and a performance-based composite score of executive functions among children with higher pretest scores; (b) relaxation training improved performance-based cognitive flexibility and the composite score of executive functions among children with lower pretest scores; (c) children receiving mindfulness training had higher handwriting fluency and better grades in Portuguese than those receiving relaxation training. These findings provide preliminary evidence on the benefits of mindfulness training in educational settings and highlight the moderating role of baseline performance on those benefits.

Reduced deficits observed in children and adolescents with developmental language disorder using proper nonverbalizable span tasks.

BACKGROUND: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD)-previously called Specific Language Impairment (SLI)-often perform poorly in verbal working memory (WM) tasks, but the picture is less clear regarding their visuospatial WM capacity. Recent research has been inconclusive regarding whether visuospatial working memory is impaired in DLD. Additionally, it is still unclear whether the putative disparity of WM performance persists in adolescence. AIMS: The aim of the current study was to unveil potential impairments in verbal and visuospatial working memory in DLD by exploring two developmental age groups of French-speaking children and adolescents. METHODS: This study examined verbal and nonverbal short-term and working memory capacity using digit span and Corsi block tasks in twelve children (7-11-year-olds) and twelve adolescents (12-18-year-olds) with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to that in their typically developing peers. RESULTS: Our findings showed that both children and adolescents with DLD have deficits in storage and processing ability for the verbal domain. However, both the short-term and working memory estimates of immediate capacity for visuospatial information in adolescents with DLD were virtually intact. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that both verbal and nonverbal storage and processing capacity are largely modulated by age, suggesting that the children with DLD show virtually intact nonverbal working memory capacity as they reach adolescence.

Writing Before Speaking Modifies Speech Production.

We investigated whether orthographic information influences speech production. We used a non-color-word version of the Stroop task in which participants had to ignore the presented words but name their ink color instead. In two experiments, we manipulated the phonological and orthographic relationships between the words and their ink color and the tasks' context by preactivating or not orthographic information. The relation between the first letter of the prime word and the first phoneme of the color name was phonological or orthographic and phonological or unrelated. In Experiment 1, only phonological information carried out by the prime word affected spoken naming; orthographic information did not help. In Experiment 2, speech production was influenced by orthographic information only after an initial writing task. This confirms that orthographic information can support speaking and that speech is sensitive to properties of the task's context, suggesting that orthographic information is coactivated online with phonological information.

The management of cohesion in written narratives in students with specific language impairment: Differences between childhood and adolescence.

The goal of this study was to investigate the management of cohesion by children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) when writing a narrative in a communicative situation. Twelve children with SLI (from 7 to 11 years old) and 12 adolescents with SLI (from 12 to 18 years old) were chronological age-matched with 24 typically developing (TD) children and 24 TD adolescents. All participants attended mainstream classes: children in elementary schools and adolescents in middle and high schools. Analyses of cohesion focused on both density and diversity of connectives, punctuation marks and anaphors. Results attested that children with SLI were greatly impaired in their management of written cohesion and used specific forms previously observed in narrative speech such as left dislocations. By contrast, and not expected, the management of written cohesion by adolescents with SLI was close to that of their TD peers. The communicative writing situation we set up, which engaged participants to take into account the addressee, also made possible for adolescents with SLI to manage cohesion in writing.

Flexibility of orthographic and graphomotor coordination during a handwritten copy task: effect of time pressure.

The coordination of the various processes involved in language production is a subject of keen debate in writing research. Some authors hold that writing processes can be flexibly coordinated according to task demands, whereas others claim that process coordination is entirely inflexible. For instance, orthographic planning has been shown to be resource-dependent during handwriting, but inflexible in typing, even under time pressure. The present study therefore went one step further in studying flexibility in the coordination of orthographic processing and graphomotor execution, by measuring the impact of time pressure during a handwritten copy task. Orthographic and graphomotor processes were observed via syllable processing. Writers copied out two- and three-syllable words three times in a row, with and without time pressure. Latencies and letter measures at syllable boundaries were analyzed. We hypothesized that if coordination is flexible and varies according to task demands, it should be modified by time pressure, affecting both latency before execution and duration of execution. We therefore predicted that the extent of syllable processing before execution would be reduced under time pressure and, as a consequence, syllable effects during execution would be more salient. Results showed, however, that time pressure interacted neither with syllable number nor with syllable structure. Accordingly, syllable processing appears to remain the same regardless of time pressure. The flexibility of process coordination during handwriting is discussed, as is the operationalization of time pressure constraints.

Lexical spelling in children and adolescents with specific language impairment: variations with the writing situation.

The goal of this study was to compare the lexical spelling performance of children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) in two contrasting writing situations: a dictation of isolated words (a classic evaluative situation) and a narrative of a personal event (a communicative situation). Twenty-four children with SLI and 48 typically developing children participated in the study, split into two age groups: 7-11 and 12-18 years of age. Although participants with SLI made more spelling errors per word than typically developing participants of the same chronological age, there was a smaller difference between the two groups in the narratives than in the dictations. Two of the findings are particularly noteworthy: (1) Between 12 and 18 years of age, in communicative narration, the number of spelling errors of the SLI group was not different from that of the typically developing group. (2) In communicative narration, the participants with SLI did not make specific spelling errors (phonologically unacceptable), contrary to what was shown in the dictation. From an educational perspective or that of a remediation program, it must be stressed that the communicative narration provides children-and especially adolescents-with SLI an opportunity to demonstrate their improved lexical spelling abilities. Furthermore, the results encourage long-term lexical spelling education, as adolescents with SLI continue to show improvement between 12 and 18 years of age.

Processing of syllables during handwriting: effects of graphomotor constraints.

The processing of syllables during the writing of isolated words has been shown to occur either before or during the writing of the word containing them. To demonstrate that this difference is related to graphomotor constraints, participants copied bi- and trisyllabic words three times, in four conditions where graphomotor constraints were gradually increased. As expected, latencies were only affected by syllable number in the low-constraint condition. In all four conditions, interletter intervals at syllable boundaries were longer than intrasyllabic interletter intervals. The difference between inter- and intrasyllabic intervals increased with the level of graphomotor constraint. Taken together, these findings indicate that under low graphomotor-constraint conditions, all the syllable processing takes place prior to the writing of a word, whereas under higher graphomotor-constraint conditions, syllable processing is more sequential, each syllable being processed just before it is written.

Visuospatial processing in memory for word location in writing.

Two experiments examined how visuospatial processing engaged during text composition intervenes in memory for word location. Experiment 1 showed that in contrast to participants who performed a spatial task concurrently with composing a text, participants who performed a concurrent visual task recalled fewer word locations after the composition. Consequently, it is hypothesized that writers process the written text in order to visually represent its physical layout, and that this representation is then used when locating words. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing a standard composition condition (with the written trace) with a condition in which the written trace was suppressed during composition, and with a condition without written trace and with added visual noise. Memory for word location only decreased with visual noise, indicating that construction of the visual representation of the text does not rely on the written trace but involves visual working memory.

Memory for words location in writing.

In two experiments, we investigated memory for words location after writing a text. Experiment 1 demonstrated the existence of a memory for words location in writing by showing that participants who first composed a text and were then asked to locate words extracted from their text performed above a chance level established using a computer simulation, and better than participants who did not compose a text but were told the subject of the text. Experiment 2 showed that memory for words location in writing is mainly supported by a visuospatial representation of the text, as indicated by the lower recall of words location by participants who performed a visuospatial concurrent task at the time of the composition, compared with participants who performed a verbal concurrent task. The findings highlight the role of a spatial representation of the physical layout of the text and the role of such a memory in the writing process.

Execution and pauses in writing narratives: processing time, cognitive effort and typing skill.

At the behavioural level, the activity of a writer can be described as periods of typing separated by pauses. Although some studies have been concerned with the functions of pauses, few have investigated motor execution periods. Precise estimates of the distribution of writing processes, and their cognitive demands, across periods of typing and pauses are lacking. Furthermore, it is uncertain how typing skill affects these aspects of writing. We addressed these issues, selecting writers of low and high typing skill who performed dictation and composition tasks. The occurrences of writing processes were assessed through directed verbalization, and their cognitive demands were measured through interference in reaction times (IRT). Before writing a narrative, 34 undergraduates learned to categorize examples of introspective thoughts as different types of activities related to writing (planning, translating, or revising). Then, while writing, they responded to random auditory probes, and reported their ongoing activity according to the learned categories. Convergent with previous findings, translating was most often reported, and revising and planning had fewer occurrences. Translating was mostly activated during motor execution, whereas revising and planning were mainly activated during pauses. However, none of the writing processes can be characterized as being typical of pauses, since translating was activated to a similar extent as the other two processes. Regarding cognitive demands, revising is likely to be the most demanding process in narrative writing. Typing skill had an impact on IRTs of motor execution. The demands of execution were greater in the low than in the high typing skill group, but these greater demands did not affect the strategy of writing processes activation. Nevertheless, low typing skill had a detrimental impact on text quality.

Verbal, visual, and spatial working memory in written language production.

College students wrote definitions of either abstract or concrete nouns in longhand while performing a concurrent working memory (WM) task. They detected either a verbal (syllable), visual (shape), or spatial (location) stimulus and decided whether it matched the last one presented 15-45s earlier. Writing definitions of both noun types elevated the response time to verbal targets above baseline. Such interference was observed for visual targets only when defining concrete nouns and was eliminated entirely with spatial targets. The interference effect for verbal targets was the same whether they were read or heard, implicating phonological storage. The findings suggest that language production requires phonological or verbal WM. Visual WM is selectively engaged when imaging the referents of concrete nouns.