Search Results (21)

It is theoretically accepted that Chinese two-character words (2C-words) are processed both holistically and according to their constituent characters. Given the evidence on readers’ sensitivities to the syntactic relationships between the constituent characters, however, this general view might not fully explain the 2C-word processing mechanism. As an important category of 2C-words, verb–object constructions (VOCs) exhibit significant heterogeneity in splittability, the degree of syntactic phrasalization through the insertion of other characters between the constituent characters. To examine skilled readers’ VOC processing under the influences of splittability and whether the constituent characters are bound or free characters (character type), two experiments were conducted on a cohort of college students, who were Chinese native speakers, using the lexical decision task in a repetition priming paradigm. The prime stimuli (primer type) comprised three conditions: (a) the targets themselves, (b) the targets’ transposed non-words, and (c) non-linguistic baseline symbols ‘※※’. The primers’ two constituents were presented simultaneously and sequentially in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. A significant interaction was revealed across both experiments between splittability and character type in the participants’ performance. The main effect was significant for primer type in the participants’ performance in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2, however, the interaction was significant both between primer type and splittability in the participants’ performance and between primer type and character type in their reaction times. In addition to confirming the general view, skilled readers might inevitably experience syntactic and semantic combinations of the constituent characters in their processing of VOCs. Full article

This contribution provides new data on Italian first language acquisition and phonological development in preschool children. In total, 104 3- to 6;4-year-old typically developing Italian children were tested with two novel nonword tasks tackling the Italian consonantal system: one for repetition (NWR) and one for discrimination (NWD). NWR data were analyzed in terms of repetition accuracy, featural characteristics, and phonological processes, while NWD was analyzed according to signal detection theory (i.e., A-prime and d-prime) and in terms of discrimination accuracy. The results show the significant role of age on children’s repetition and discrimination abilities: as the children grow older, all the scores improve and the number of errors declines. No complete overlap is found between what children can produce and what they can discriminate, which is in line with what has already been documented in other languages. The findings contribute to the state of the art on the Italian language and provide new perspectives on some methodological issues specific to this language. Full article

Introduction: The objective of the current study was two-fold. First, it aimed to estimate receptive vocabulary and expressive syntax skills in L2 Italian among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children of migrant single-mother families with very low socioeconomic status (SES). This objective was achieved by matching the participants’ performance with normative data. Secondly, this study aimed to identify which individual and language exposure factors contributed to learning L2 vocabulary and syntax. Methods: Twenty-four early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children (age range = 5.10–12.4 years) and their mothers were enrolled. Mothers answered questions about linguistic biography and demographic information. Children completed Lexical Comprehension, Sentence Repetition, and Non-Word Repetition tasks from the Language Assessment Battery for 4–12-year-olds to, respectively, assess receptive vocabulary, expressive syntax, and phonological processing. Moreover, non-verbal intellectual functioning was evaluated by the Raven’s Test. Results/Discussion: Compared to normative data, 20 children showed lower receptive vocabulary abilities (<−1.5 SD), 24 lower expressive syntax skills (−2DS), and 7 children lower phonological processing (<−1.5 DS). Moreover, L2 phonological processing and the length of L2 exposure in an educational context positively predicted L2 receptive vocabulary as well as L2 expressive syntax skills. To date, performance in L2 among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children from migrant households and very low SES remains underexplored. Future efforts need to be directed towards the understanding of factors that impact oral competence in L2, considering that these children will also be exposed to written L2 in the school context. Full article

The focus of the present paper is twofold; the first objective is to examine how children with dyslexia (henceforward DYS children) and typically developing children (henceforward TD children) performed in Greek (first language; L1) compared to English (second language; L2) in reading, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), working memory (WM), and short-term memory (STM) tasks. Our second goal is to investigate DYS children’s performance compared to that of TD children in the L1 and L2 domains mentioned above. Thirty-two (DYS = 16; TD = 16) school-aged children (9;7–11;9 years old; M_age = 130.41), basic users of English (level ranging from A1 to A2), carried out a battery test in L1 and L2, respectively, including reading, PA, STM, and WM tasks. More specifically, the tasks were the following: word and nonword decoding, reading accuracy and reading fluency, word and nonword reading per minute, PA, RAN, nonword repetition, as well as forward, backward, and digit span sequencing. This is a work-in-progress study, and preliminary results reveal that DYS students exhibit important reading and memory deficits in both languages. The data analysis indicated that DYS children have particular difficulties and statistically significant differences in L1 and L2 compared to TD in all tasks. In conclusion, this is the first study, at least in Greek, which assesses both reading and memory skills of DYS children in L2. The results reveal deficits in both languages, and the overall findings contribute to theories on the transfer of difficulties of linguistic skills between L1 and L2, while memory scores also underline this co-occurrence. Future implications of this study include a combination of reading and cognitive activities in the teaching methods of English teachers to improve DYS children’s overall performance in learning English as L2. Full article

As in many other countries, baseline data concerning the linguistic development of bilingual children in Sweden are lacking, and suitable methods for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals are lacking as well. This study presents reference data from 108 typically developing (TD) Turkish/Swedish-speaking children aged 4;0–8;1, for a range of language tasks developed specifically for the assessment of bilinguals (LITMUS test battery, COST Action IS0804). We report on different types of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks (language-specific and language-independent), receptive and expressive vocabulary (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLTs), and narrative macrostructure comprehension and production (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, MAIN) in Turkish, the children’s home language, and in Swedish, the language of schooling and society. Performance was investigated in relation to age, language exposure, type of task, and (for NWR and narratives) vocabulary size. There was a positive development with age for all tasks, but effects of language exposure and vocabulary size differed between tasks. Six bilingual Turkish/Swedish children with DLD were individually compared to the TD children. TD/DLD performance overlapped substantially, particularly for NWR, and more so for the production than the comprehension tasks. Surprisingly, the discriminatory potential was poor for both language-specific and language-independent NWR. DLD case studies underscored the importance of interpreting language scores in relation to exposure history, and the need for an increased emphasis on functional language skills as reported by parents and teachers when assessing and diagnosing DLD in bilinguals. Full article

The present study explores comparatively the effectiveness of a cognitive (verbal short-term memory (vSTM), verbal working memory (vWM)) and of a linguistic training (10-week duration each) in the diffusion of gains in cognitive abilities (vSTM and vWM) of in school-aged Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To this purpose, two computerized training programs i.e., a linguistic and a cognitive one, were developed and applied to three groups (A, B, and C) of children with DLD (N = 49, in total). There were three assessments with two vSTM tasks (non-word repetition and forward digit span) and a vWM task (backward digit span): pre-therapeutically (time 1), where no significant between-group differences were found, post-therapeutically I (time 2), and post-therapeutically II (time 3) and two training phases. In phase Ι, group A received meta-syntactic training, whereas group B vSTM/vWM training and group C received no training. In phase ΙΙ, a reversal of treatment was performed for groups A and B: group A received vSTM/vWM while group B meta-syntactic training. Again, group C received no training. Overall, the results indicated a significant performance improvement for the treatment groups and revealed beneficial far-transfer effects as language therapy can affect vSTM and vWM in addition to direct and near transfer effects. In addition, the intervention type order affected performance as follows: first, better performance on the vSTM task (non-word repetition) was shown when the linguistic treatment was delivered first; second, better performance on the vWM in Time 2 and Time 3 was shown by group B, for which the cognitive treatment was delivered first. Concluding, not only intervention type but also intervention type order can affect performance in DLD. Full article

While cognitive abilities in people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) have been studied in detail, little is known about linguistic abilities in PwMS and their relation to cognitive impairment. In this cross-sectional explorative study, we aim to investigate the morphosyntactic abilities of PwMS alongside their cognitive performance. Furthermore, we explore the effect of clinical factors, namely, the disease duration and MS type, on the linguistic and cognitive performance of PwMS. By so doing, we aim to shed light on neurocognitive and clinical correlates of linguistic performance in PwMS. We included 78 patients and 78 age-, sex- and education-matched healthy individuals. All participants were additionally administered the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis (BICAMS) battery, a verbal short-term memory task (non-word repetition) and questionnaires about mood, fatigue and quality of life. In addition, they underwent examinations with morphology and syntax tasks. PwMS were found to be impaired in morphology (past tense) and selectively impaired in syntax alongside cognitive impairments. Disease duration had the main impact on cognitive abilities. The MS type selectively impacted linguistic abilities, as shown by the remarkably deficient performance of the MS individuals with the progressive disease subtype. Linguistic impairments were predicted by only one measure of the BICAM test, namely, the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), a measure of cognitive processing speed. Overall, this study contributes to the better understanding of the linguistic profile of PwMS by reporting selective deficits in their morphological and syntactical abilities. Furthermore, it provides insights into the clinical and cognitive correlates of linguistic performance. By so doing, it suggests clinical implications for the development of intervention programs for PwMS. Full article

Letter migrations between words in reading aloud (e.g., reading “cane love” as “lane love” or “lane cove”) are known to result from a deficit in the visual-orthographic analysis and characterize attentional dyslexia. In spontaneous speech, individuals with impairment in the phonological output buffer may show migrations of phonemes between words. The purpose of this study was to examine whether migrations between words in reading aloud can also result from a deficit in the phonological output buffer, to explore the characteristics of migrations resulting from orthographic input and from phonological output deficits, and to examine methods to distinguish these two sources. Using tasks of reading aloud of lists of 92–182 word pairs, we identified 18 adults and adolescents with developmental dyslexia who made between-word letter migrations in reading aloud, significantly more than age-matched controls (372 adults, 26 7th-graders and 44 4th–5th-graders). To distinguish between the orthographic input and phonological output sources for these migrations, we administered a test assessing orthographic input without spoken output (written semantic decision on 140 migratable word pairs) and a repetition test of 36 auditorily presented migratable word pairs, assessing spoken output without orthographic input (as well as nonword repetition and 3 span tests). These tests indicated that the migrations in reading aloud of 10 of the participants with dyslexia resulted from an orthographic input deficit—they made migrations not only in reading aloud but also in written word pair comprehension, but not in word pair repetition. For the other 8 participants, the migrations resulted from a phonological output deficit: they made migrations in reading aloud and in word pair repetition, but not in comprehension, and had limited spans and made errors in nonword repetition. We identified several differences between the two types of between-word errors: first, the individuals with attentional dyslexia made omissions of a letter that appeared in the same position in the two words, but the phonological output buffer group did not make such omissions. Second, the groups differed in the origin of migration: orthographic input migrations involve letters that are orthographically adjacent, whereas phonological output migrations involve phonologically adjacent phonemes: phonemes that have just been spoken or that are prepared together in the phonological buffer for production. Migrations from the line below and from 2 lines above the target occurred only in the orthographic input group. This study thus indicates that between-word migrations in reading aloud can result not only from attentional dyslexia, but also from a phonological output buffer deficit, and offers ways to distinguish between the two. Full article

The Fragile X premutation is a genetic instability of the FMR1 gene caused by 55–199 recurrences of the CGG sequence, whereas there are only 7–54 repeats of the CGG sequence in the normal condition. While males with the premutation of Fragile X were found to have difficulties in executive functions and working memory, little data have been collected on females. This study is among the first to address executive functions and phonological memory in females with the Fragile X premutation. Twenty-three female carriers aged 20–55 years and twelve non carrier females matched in age and levels of education (in years) participated in this study. Executive functions and phonological memory were assessed using the self-report questionnaire The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) and behavioral measures (nonword repetitions, forward and backward digit span). Females who were carriers of the premutation of the FMR1 gene reported less efficient executive functions in the BRIEF questionnaire compared to the control group. In addition, a relationship was found between the number of repetitions on the CGG sequence of nucleotides, nonword repetitions, and forward digit span. The findings suggest that the premutation of Fragile X in females affects their performance of executive functions and may have impact on everyday functioning. Full article

Due to the difficulties in differentiating bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) from bilingual children with temporary language difficulties that may be caused by heterogeneous language input, language assessments of bilingual children are challenging for clinicians. Research demonstrates that assessments of bilingual children should be in all the languages a bilingual child speaks. This can be arduous for clinicians, but computerised screening approaches provide potential solutions. MuLiMi is a new web-based platform designed to automatise screening procedures for bilingual children at risk of DLD. To validate this procedure and investigate its reliability, 36 Spanish-speaking children, aged 4–6 years old, living in Italy, were tested remotely using the Italian–Spanish MuLiMi DLD screening. Sixteen of the participants were previously diagnosed with DLD. L2 (second or societal language) as well as L1 (first or family language) language abilities in static (nonword repetition, grammaticality judgement, and verb comprehension) as well as dynamic tasks (dynamic novel word learning) were assessed. Speed and accuracy of the children’s responses were automatically recorded (except nonword repetition). Significant associations emerged between the results obtained in the screening tasks when comparing them to parental questionnaires and standardised tests. An exploratory analysis of the diagnostic accuracy indicates that the single screening scores as well as the overall total score significantly contribute to DLD (risk) identification. Full article

Pure agraphias are caused by graphemic buffer damage. The graphemic buffer stores graphemic representations that handle the transition from spelling lexicon to writing or oral spellings. The authors report a case of a crossed pure agraphia, following the post-surgical removal of a right frontal low-grade glioma in a right-handed French patient. He presented a pure agraphia displaying the features of a graphemic buffer impairment. Our patient only made spelling errors, whereas repetition and other oral language abilities remained perfect. We found a greater number of errors for longer stimuli, increased errors for the medially located graphemes, and agraphia for both words and non-words and error types, essentially consisting of omissions, substitutions, and letter transpositions. We also observed no significant effect of word frequency on spelling errors, but word length affected the rate of errors. The particularity of this case was linked to right frontal subcortical injuries in a right-handed subject. To our knowledge, it is the first report of a crossed pure agraphia caused by graphemic buffer impairment. Further studies are needed in order to analyse the role of subcortical structures, particularly the caudate nucleus in the graphemic buffer during writing tasks, as well as the participation of the non-dominant hemisphere in writing language. Full article

Refugee children tend to show low emotional well-being and weak executive functions that may have consequences on language and therefore complicate a potential diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in this population. We assessed the performance of 140 children living in Switzerland aged 5 to 8 (20 monolinguals, 86 non-refugee bilinguals, 34 refugee bilinguals) on LITMUS language tasks (nonword repetition, sentence repetition, parental questionnaire), standardized language tasks, memory and executive function tasks. Parents also filled in the Child Behavior Checklist providing a measure of their child’s emotional well-being. Results indicate that refugee children are more emotionally vulnerable and show weaker performance in memory and executive functions tasks compared to non-refugee children, in line with the existing literature. Moreover, when compared to non-refugee bilingual children with similar length of exposure to French, refugee children are disadvantaged on all language tasks. Whereas emotional well-being does not predict language performance, memory and executive functions show up as predictors of both LITMUS and standardized language tasks, although in an unsystematic way. It is concluded that refugee children are at risk across the board and that a better understanding of the complex interplay between well-being, executive functions, memory and language is needed in order to build more appropriate diagnostic tools for these children. Full article

The differentiation between subtypes of speech sound disorder (SSD) and the involvement of possible underlying deficits is part of ongoing research and debate. The present study adopted a data-driven approach and aimed to identify and describe deficits and subgroups within a sample of 150 four to seven-year-old Dutch children with SSD. Data collection comprised a broad test battery including the Computer Articulation Instrument (CAI). Its tasks Picture Naming (PN), NonWord Imitation (NWI), Word and NonWord Repetition (WR; NWR) and Maximum Repetition Rate (MRR) each render a variety of parameters (e.g., percentage of consonants correct) that together provide a profile of strengths and weaknesses of different processes involved in speech production. Principal Component Analysis on the CAI parameters revealed three speech domains: (1) all PN parameters plus three parameters of NWI; (2) the remaining parameters of NWI plus WR and NWR; (3) MRR. A subsequent cluster analysis revealed three subgroups, which differed significantly on intelligibility, receptive vocabulary, and auditory discrimination but not on age, gender and SLPs diagnosis. The clusters could be typified as three specific profiles: (1) phonological deficit; (2) phonological deficit with motoric deficit; (3) severe phonological and motoric deficit. These results indicate that there are different profiles of SSD, which cover a spectrum of degrees of involvement of different underlying problems. Full article

This study evaluates whether the short version of the German LITMUS quasi-universal nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR) can be used as an index test for monolingual and early second language learners (eL2) of German aged 8 to 10 years. The NWR taps into quasi-universal phonological knowledge via the so-called language-independent part and into language-specific phonological knowledge via the language-dependent part. Thirty-six monolingual and thirty-three eL2 learners of German, typically developing (TD) and diagnosed as language-impaired (DLD), participated in the study. The effects of the language group (Mo vs. eL2) and the clinical status (TD vs. DLD) on repetition accuracy are investigated by a logistic mixed-model analysis. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and likelihood ratios are calculated to determine the diagnostic accuracy of the two parts. The group comparisons showed significant effects of the clinical status but not of the language group. The ROC analyses and the likelihood ratios reveal better diagnostic values for the language-dependent compared to the language-independent part and almost similar diagnostic values for the monolingual and the eL2 group. The results indicate that the LITMUS-QU-NWR helps to disentangle DLD and DLD in monolingual children and eL2 learners aged 8 to 10 years. Full article

The Arabic-speaking community in Sweden is large and diverse, yet linguistic reference data are lacking for Arabic-Swedish-speaking children. This study presents reference data from 99 TD children aged 4;0–7;11 on receptive and expressive vocabulary in the minority and the majority language, as well as for three types of non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. Vocabulary scores were investigated in relation to age, language exposure, and socio-economic status (SES). NWR performance was explored in relation to age, type of task, item properties, language exposure, and vocabulary. Eleven children with DLD were compared to the TD group. Age and language exposure were important predictors of vocabulary scores in both languages, but SES did not affect vocabulary scores in any language. Age and vocabulary size had a positive effect on NWR accuracy, whilst increasing item length and presence of clusters had an adverse effect. There was substantial overlap between the TD and DLD children for both vocabulary and NWR performance. Diagnostic accuracy was at best suggestive for NWR; no task or type of item was better at separating the two groups. Reports from parents and teachers on developmental history, language exposure, and functional language skills emerged as important factors for correctly identifying DLD in bilinguals. Full article