Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are at risk for reading disability and academic failure, and there remains a lack of scientific consensus about the underlying deficits that may explain their language difficulties. This study examined how language ability predicts preschoolers' eye movements during a naturalistic storybook reading task, a possible indicator of comprehension processes in real-time. We used eye-tracking measures to examine comprehension processes in 49 preschoolers with wide-ranging language abilities, using language skill as a continuous predictor variable. Participants viewed and listened to a storybook presented on an eye-tracking computer. Portions of each illustration that corresponded with a noun phrase in the text were considered target images during the time course of the spoken referent. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that children had similar latency to target images regardless of language level. However, language ability was a significant predictor of proportion of fixations; children with higher language skills had more fixations on target images and less fixations on control images than children with lower language skills. These results suggest that children with lower language abilities attended to the story but did not sufficiently sustain attention to relevant images and continued to attend to extraneous images after the onset of spoken noun phrases. Speech-language pathologists and early childhood educators should be aware that children with language difficulties may need help identifying what is most important to attend to during shared storybook reading.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) struggle in a variety of social contexts. These children display different forms of social withdrawal, the most prevalent being shyness which is behaviorally manifested as reticence. The goal of the current study was to further explore the relationship between DLD and reticence in children using a revised set of items from the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS). A total of 220 children participated in the study. A univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine if there were significant differences related to group, age, and gender on reticence. Findings revealed a significant difference based on group, indicating children with DLD demonstrate significantly higher levels of reticence; however, age and gender were not significant. Interaction effects between the three variables were also not significant. These findings replicated previously reported findings regarding reticence in children with DLD.

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Background/Aim: The British questionnaire ECLiPS (Evaluation of Children’s Listening and Processing Skills; Barry & Moore, 2015) aims to profile listening difficulties in children. The questionnaire consists of 38 statements, divided into five subscales, and a short survey with six questions about general health. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children diagnosed with Developmental Phonological Disorder (DPD) in their preschool years (3-6 years of age) show listening difficulties in early school years (7-10 years). Methods: 113 guardians of children with Developmental Phonological Disorder (DPD) and 44 guardians of typically developing (TD) Swedish children participated in the study. Comparisons were made between the Swedish TD-group and the English reference (ER) group presented in the ECLiPS technical manual. Mean scores between the DPD-group and the TD-group were compared, as well as were the responses on the short survey. The groups were categorized by age and gender. Results: In general, high consistency was found between the ER- and TD-group in half of the comparisons; 7-, 9- and 10-year-old boys and 8-year-old girls. The DPD-group tended to show more symptoms of listening difficulties than the TD-group. However, the symptoms varied in relation to age and gender. For example, girls in the DPD-group had more symptoms in younger than in older ages. The short survey revealed that the DPD-group had a higher prevalence of ear infections than the TD-group. The difficulties seen in the DPD-group were most profound in statements concerning language, literacy and laterality. Conclusion: Our results indicate that listening difficulties as measured with the ECLiPS are more common in children diagnosed with DPD in preschool years, than typically developing children. The strongest indication for difficulties is seen in the statements regarding language and literacy.   Bakgrund/syfte: Det brittiska frågeformuläret ECLiPS (Evaluation of Children’s Listening and Processing Skills; Barry & Moore, 2015) syftar till att kartlägga lyssningssvårigheter hos barn. Frågeformuläret består av 38 påståenden, indelade i fem underkategorier, samt en kort enkät med sex frågor rörande generell hälsa. Syftet med den här studien var att undersöka huruvida barn som hade diagnosticerats med fonologisk språkstörning (FS) i förskoleåldern (3-6 år) uppvisade lyssningssvårigheter i tidig skolålder (7-10 år). Metod: 113 vårdnadshavare till barn med fonologisk språkstörning och 44 vårdnadshavare till typiskt utvecklade (TU) svenska barn deltog i studien. Jämförelser gjordes mellan TU barn och den engelska referensgruppen (ER) som presenteras i ECLiPS tekniska manual. Barn med FS och barn med TU delades upp i mindre grupper baserat på kön och ålder, och medelvärdesjämförelser gjordes mellan grupperna. Jämförelser gjordes även av svaren på den medicinska enkäten. Resultat: Generellt sett hade ER-gruppen och barn med TU en hög grad av samstämmighet i hälften av jämförelserna; 7-, 9-, och 10-åriga pojkar samt 8-åriga flickor. Barn med FS tenderade att uppvisa en högre grad av lyssningssvårigheter än barn med TD. Dock varierade graden av symptom beroende på ålder och kön. Till exempel tenderade flickor med FS att uppvisa mer symptom i lägre än i högre åldrar. Svaren från den medicinska enkäten visade att barn med FS hade en högre prevalens av öroninfektioner än barn med TU. De svårigheter som barn med FS uppvisade var tydligast inom påståenden som rör språk, läs- och skrivförmåga och lateralitet. Slutsats: Våra resultat indikerar att de lyssningssvårigheter som mäts med ECLiPS är vanligare hos barn som diagnostiserats med fonologisk språkstörning i förskoleåldern än hos typiskt utvecklade barn. Den starkaste indikationen för svårigheter syns i de påståenden som rör språk-, läs- och skrivförmåga.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often face problems in areas of social communication including negotiating with peers, entering ongoing interactions, and engaging in conflict resolution. A potential cause of these social communication difficulties is the decreased ability to make emotional inferences. This thesis investigates the effects of a social communication intervention on the ability of school-aged children with DLD to make inferences about emotions. Five children with DLD between the ages of 6;10 and 12;4 participated in a social communication intervention that highlighted principles of emotion understanding (recognizing emotions in facial expressions, inferring emotions with contextual information, and discussing reasoning behind emotions) using story books to illustrate concepts. Data were gathered before and after intervention using a psychometrically balanced measure of emotional inferencing ability. Results revealed notable improvements in three of the participants and consistent performance in two of the participants baseline to follow-up. While performance on the emotional inferencing task varied due to multiple factors, the participants that showed improvement produced real growth which encourages future research to be conducted.

Statistical learning experiments have demonstrated that children and infants are sensitive to the types of statistical regularities found in natural language. These experiments often rely on statistical information based on linear dependencies, e.g. that x predicts y either immediately or after some intervening items, whereas learning to creatively use language relies on the ability to form grammatical categories (e.g. verbs, nouns) that share distributions. Distributional learning has not been explored in children or in individuals with developmental language disorder. Proposed statistical learning deficits in individuals with developmental language delay (DLD) are thought to have downstream effects related to poorer comprehension, but this relationship has not been experimentally shown. In this project, children and adults with and without DLD and their same-age typically developing (TD) peers complete an artificial grammar learning task that employs a made-up language and an online comprehension task that employs real language. In the artificial grammar learning task, participants are tested to determine if they have learned the statistical regularities of trained stimuli and formed categories based upon these regularities. We hypothesize that if individuals with DLD have difficulty utilizing distributional information from novel input, then they will show less evidence of forming new categories than TD peers. Our second hypothesis is that if regularities are learned based on experience, then adults and children will show similar learning because they will have the same exposure to the artificial language. In the online comprehension task, participants use a computer mouse to choose a preferred interpretation of a sentence that is ambiguous, but that most adults interpret a certain way due to linguistic experience. We hypothesize that if individuals with DLD have overall poorer linguistic experience compared to TD individuals, then they will show weaker effects of biases than peers. Finally, we use measurements from both tasks to verify correlation between them, for the additional goal of showing that language comprehension and statistical learning are related. This study provides information about differences between individuals with DLD and their TD peers and between adults and children in the ability to use distributional information from both accumulated and novel input. To this end, we reveal the role of input and experience in using distributional information in linguistic environments.

Kamf Hoppe, Hanna & Svensson, Cecilia (2021). Gynnsamma arbetssätt för flerspråkiga elever med språkstörning - verktyg för speciallärare. Speciallärarprogrammet inriktning grav språkstörning, Institutionen för skolutveckling och ledarskap, Lärande och samhälle, Malmö universitet (MAU), 90 hp.

State standards require kindergarten students to produce expository writing, but little research has been done regarding their abilities in this area. This study describes expository writing samples of 47 typically developing (TD) kindergarteners and 43 kindergarteners with developmental language disorder (DLD). The Expository Language Measures (ELM) Flow Chart and the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software were used to detail the language complexity and text structure features the children in the sample produced. When comparing TD and DLD children's expository written samples, no significant differences in the language and text structure measures were found. It is important to continue acquiring data regarding young children's abilities to produce expository written language. Identifying norms and areas of weakness promotes the creation of more specific and effective teaching and intervention methods.

As the population of Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States steadily grows, the importance of accurately assessing and diagnosing developmental language disorder (DLD) has also grown. Understanding a child's underlying language learning system is critical in this process. Several studies have demonstrated the efficacy of nonword repetition (NWR) tasks in bilingual children across a wide range of development, however there is little information regarding guidelines for interpretation of NWR performance or analyzing error patterns. This study was conducted to address these gaps in the research. A sample of 26 Spanish-English bilingual school aged children (6;0-9;4) were administered English and Spanish NWR, recalling sentences, and narrative tasks. Total errors, as well as errors of omission and substitution were examined across tasks, languages, and language group (typically developing-TD and developmental language disorder- DLD). Descriptive statistics revealed that DLD children made a higher number of errors across language tasks in Spanish and English than their TD peers. Group membership predicted total errors in the Spanish NWR task while controlling for age and language proficiency. Language proficiency was not a significant predictor for any of the error types above and beyond group membership. Therefore, when age and language input/output were controlled for, language ability was best predictor of the number of errors. Additionally, results showed stronger correlations between Spanish across all three language tasks in TD children and in English across two language tasks in DLD children. According to the results of the current study, total errors is the only effective error measure of language ability. However, looking at error patterns across language and language group can be informative regarding bilingual children's language learning systems. Future research should be conducted to repeat the study with a larger sample size and investigate the difference in error patterns between languages in TD and DLD children.

To address the needs of the growing number of Spanish-English bilingual children in the United States, Nonword Repetition (NWR) tasks were created to reduce testing bias in the assessment and diagnosis of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Several studies have shown promising results in the use of NWR tasks; however, fewer studies have addressed questions such as the use of different scoring methods or analyzing error patterns. Thus, this study was conducted to address these gaps in the research. An English and a Spanish NWR task were administered to 26 Spanish-English bilingual school aged children (6;0-9;4). Two different scoring methods (percent phoneme correct and whole word scoring) were compared for diagnostic accuracy and the types and frequency of errors were analyzed. Both scoring methods showed statistically significant differences between groups (participants with DLD and those with typically developing language). Whole word scoring in Spanish had the best diagnostic accuracy, according to sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratio measures. However, due to the small number of nonwords that any participant repeated correctly, this may not be a clinically practical scoring method. The Spanish NWR task was a better measure than the English NWR task in identifying children with DLD, suggesting that Spanish NWR could be used to assess DLD in bilingual children. Participants with DLD produced more consonant, vowel, substitution, and omission errors than those with typically developing language. There was no difference between groups for addition errors. Significantly more omission errors were made in Spanish, likely due to the longer nonwords. The longer nonwords may be key in distinguishing between typically developing children and those with DLD. These results have the potential to inform future clinical practices in selecting, scoring, and analyzing NWR tasks.