O Distúrbio Específico de Linguagem (DEL) é uma alteração que acomete o desenvolvimento da linguagem que não pode ser atribuído à defasagem sensorial, motora, intelectual, transtorno globais do desenvolvimento, privação social ou lesão cerebral evidente. Estudos comprovam que o desempenho de crianças com DEL é inferior ao de seus pares normais em provas de Memória de Trabalho (MT) e relacionam essa defasagem às dificuldades linguísticas destes sujeitos. É consenso que a memória de trabalho fonológica (MTF) é fundamental para o desenvolvimento da linguagem, porém, há divergências sobre o papel da memória de trabalho visual (MTV). Assim este estudo teve como objetivo comparar o desempenho de crianças com DEL e com Desenvolvimento Típico de Linguagem (DTL) em provas de MT e vocabulário receptivo; comparar o desempenho na Prova de Memória de Trabalho Fonológica (PMTF) e Teste Pictórico de Memória (TEPIC-M) verificando se há diferença em função do material ser apresentado por via auditiva ou visual e ainda, correlacionar o desempenho das crianças com DEL nas provas de MT e de vocabulário receptivo. Participaram do estudo 42 crianças sendo 14 delas com diagnóstico de DEL e 28 com DTL, pareadas pela idade cronológica, foram aplicados dois testes que avaliam a memória de trabalho (PMTF e TEPIC-M) e um teste que avalia vocabulário receptivo (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test- PPVT-III). Para a análise estatística foram utilizados os testes t de Student para comparação entre os grupos e Correlação de Pearson para correlacionar os resultados entre as provas. Os resultados mostraram que as crianças com DEL apresentam desempenho inferior em relação aos seus pares normais em ambas as provas de MT, sendo que, em maior proporção na prova de PMTF, havendo correlação entre todos os testes aplicados. Assim conclui-se que crianças com DEL apresentam defasagem na MTF e na MTV, nesta última em menor proporção. Quanto maior a defasagem nas habilidades de memória, maior foi a defasagem no vocabulário destas crianças. Tanto crianças com DEL, como as com DTL apresentaram pior desempenho quando o estímulo foi apresentado por via auditiva comparado àquele apresentado por via visual. / The Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a disorder that affects the language development and cant be attributed to lag sensory, motor, intellectual and pervasive developmental disorder, social deprivation or evident brain lesion. Studies show that the performance of SLI children is lower than their normal peers in Working Memory (WM) tests and relate this discrepancy to the linguistic difficulties of these subjects. There is consensus that phonological working memory (PWM) is critical to language development, but there are disagreements about the role of visual working memory (VWM). So this study aimed to compare the performance of children with SLI and typical language development (TLD) in WM tests and receptive vocabulary, to compare the performance in Phonological Working Memory Test (PWMT) and Pictorial Memory Test (PMT) checking whether there are differences depending on the material being presented through auditory or visual, still, to correlate the performance of children with SLI on receptive vocabulary tests and WM tests. The study included 42 children, 14 of them with SLI and 28 with TLD, paired with chronological age, were applied two tests that assessed working memory (PWMT and PMT) and a receptive vocabulary test (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - PPVT-III). For statistical analysis were used t of Student test for comparison between groups and Pearson Correlation to correlate the results between tests. The results showed that children with SLI perform below their peers in relation to normal in both WM tests, mainly on the PWMT, there was correlation between all tests. Thus it is concluded that children with SLI present deficits in PWM and VWM, the latter in a smaller proportion. The higher is the gap in their memory skills, the higher is the gap in the vocabulary of these children. Both children with SLI, as with TLD showed a worse performance when the stimulus was presented auditory compared to that presented by visual means.

Many school-age children with language impairment (LI) have difficulties with aspects of social and emotional learning. This study was structured to evaluate one aspect of the effectiveness of a social communication intervention, the appropriate production of emotion words. Four school-aged children with LI participated in 20 sessions of story-based intervention targeting understanding and usage of emotion-based words. Emotions targeted included the emotion word categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Because the knowledge of the emotion word categories varied from child to child, each child had different target words. The percentage of correct production of targeted emotion word categories was tracked, recorded and presented in figure format. The percentage of correct productions provided an estimation of the participants' usage and understanding of emotion-based words from session to session. Percentage of nonoverlapping data (PND) for each participant (subdivided by emotion) was calculated where appropriate as one measure of the effectiveness of the intervention. Although somewhat variable, the data showed that the children did make progress in their use of some of the emotion word categories that they did not understand at baseline. The results of the study present some promising preliminary findings.

This thesis examines the efficacy of a social communication intervention in increasing the emotion word productions in school-aged children with language impairment (LI). The study had a multiple baseline single subject design in which 5 children between the ages of 6 and 11 received 20 intervention sessions, each lasting 20 minutes. Intervention activities included reading and discussing children's books, enacting the stories using toys, and journal writing to reflect on experiences in each session. Emotion word productions during intervention sessions were coded for total productions within the categories of happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, and disgust. Productions were also coded for type (spontaneous, in response to a question, cued, or imitated) and valence agreement. The percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) was calculated (measuring the overall percentage of sessions in which the participants produced more emotion words than they did in the baseline session with the most emotion word productions) in order to show efficacy of the intervention for each participant. According to PND calculations, the intervention was generally effective for 3 of the 5 children and was effective in at least one emotion category for each participant. Participants demonstrated no difficulties with valence agreement. Data regarding types of production indicated that the majority of emotion word productions during the intervention were elicited in some way rather than spontaneous. These results suggest that children with LI increased the number of emotion word productions during the intervention, but were still dependent upon the scaffolding provided by the intervention.

Children diagnosed with Language Impairment (LI) often have difficulty with aspects of social communication. This thesis evaluates the effects of a social communication intervention focused on facilitating the correct production of emotion words in four elementary school-aged children with LI. Researchers monitored changes from pretreatment baseline data, through the intervention, and ended with posttreatment follow-up data for the emotions happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Based on baseline measures, emotion categories in which the child showed limited proficiency were targeted for the 20 intervention sessions. The emotions targeted were different for each child. Each intervention session contained a combination of storybook therapeutic strategies such as story enactment, story sharing, and modeling by the clinician to help increase the child's emotion understanding. The child participated in emotion recognition and emotion inferencing tasks. The data for each participant was analyzed individually and formatted into figures. Data analyzation was performed using percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) which provided insight into how successful the intervention was for each of the targeted emotions. The results of each child's emotion based words were varied, some participants making good progress and others showing little or no gains. These results suggest that the intervention was effective for some of the children and should continued to be refined.

Numerous studies have shown that children identified with Language Impairment (LI) have marked difficulty with producing story narratives compared to their typically developing peers. One particular area of weakness seen in the narratives of children with LI is their ability to incorporate internal states, specifically internal response, internal plan, and emotion words. The current study examines five children with LI and their descriptions of mental and emotional states of characters in story narratives under spontaneous and prompted conditions. Participants produced story retells based on a series of wordless picture books taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument. Story retells were elicited twice for each story, once with and once without verbal prompts. As expected, children produced more internal state story elements in response to prompts. As children produced more of these elements, however, their accuracy decreased, and the states they reported did not always reflect the story content. The children with LI showed limited understanding and ability to interpret the reactions, motivations, and emotions that characters experienced. However, verbal prompts did reveal children's current abilities and understanding of internal states.

No description available.

Purpose. The purpose of this research project was to compare the narrative content organization (macrostructure) of young children with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with typical language development (TL). While it is well-known that young children with SLI display poorer use of grammar (microstructure) than their TL language similar peers (Leaonard, 2014; Rice et al., 1998) less is known about their use of macrostructure. Thus, the research question was: What are the narrative skills of children with SLI as compared to their language similar peers with development TL? Based on research with older children (Gillam et al., 2016), it was hypothesized that children with SLI will have poorer narrative macrostructure of narratives than those with TL. Method. The experiment compared 6 children with SLI (mean age: 5 years, 2 months) and 8 language similar children with TL (mean age: 4 years, 8 months). Language equivalency was determined based on administration of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool-2 and the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. As well, all the participants passed a hearing screening and performed in the average range on the Preschool Test of Nonverbal Intelligence. Researchers read two books, Gossie and Gossie & Gertie (Dunrea, 2002, 2002) to each child. After reading each book, the child retold the story while looking through the pictures as a guide, yielding 12 SLI samples and 16 TL samples. The stories were audio-recorded and transcribed using a consensus method of reliability. Researchers then coded the stories for presence and quality of the following components: Character, Setting, Initiating Event, Internal Response, Plan, Action/Attempt, and Consequence. Once coded, the components were then scored on a 3-point scale using Gillam et al. (2012) narrative development progressmonitoring tool. Results and Conclusions. First, outcomes of the two stories were compared using an ANOVA design with Story Components and Story as within group factors. Because Gossie & Gertie had one more character than Gertie, it naturally scored significantly higher on Characters. Otherwise, the stories did not reliably differ and were combined for further analysis. Next a mixed model ANOVA design with Story Components as a within group factor and Group as a between group faction was conducted. The results indicated no statistically significant main effects or interactions. The findings did not support the hypothesis, suggesting that the narrative skills of children with SLI are equivalent to their language similar peers with TL. It may be as children get older and their narratives become more complex, children with SLI begin to fall further behind yielding the differences reported in the literature. This project prompts future questions about narrative macrostructure skills of young age-matched children with SLI and TL and use of macrostructure skills in more complex stories.

Narrative production and comprehension is a difficult task for children with language impairment (LI). Their stories are typically shorter and contain more grammatical errors than the stories of typically developing age-matched peers. This pilot study describes the abilities of six children with LI to produce stories from pictured stimuli. Stories were elicited from each child during a 10-week period. Stimulus pictures and coding procedures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument were employed to analyze the participants' story grammar (SG). Eight SG elements were assessed including character introduction, setting, initiating event (IE), internal response (IR), internal plan (IP), attempt, and outcome. The children varied highly in their production of SG elements. The SG elements that described the internal states, emotions, and motivations of the characters were the most difficult for all participants.

Many children identified with Language Impairment (LI) demonstrate difficulty comprehending and producing narratives. Their narratives are often structurally less complex and of overall poorer quality than those produced by their typically developing peers. These difficulties may negatively impact the academic and social success of children with LI. This thesis evaluates the performance of five school-aged children with LI on a story retell probe embedded within an intervention designed to address their social and emotional language abilities. During the 10-week intervention, participants completed a series of story retell probes using wordless picture books. The story stimuli were taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument, which included six stories (divided into two story sets), elicited twice (12 total story retells). The production of story grammar (SG) categories was analyzed for each story retell. The results for each participant and SG category varied greatly, but all participants had difficulty producing the more complex SG elements. Although each participant demonstrated some improvement from the first retell to the second on at least one story, overall performance remained fairly stable over the 10-week period. Future research is needed to determine effective ways to support more complex story narratives in children with LI.

Many school-age children with a diagnosis of Language Impairment (LI) also have social communication difficulties. Some of these difficulties are related to deficits in emotion understanding. This thesis evaluates the effects of a social communication intervention designed to increase the production of emotion-based words as an indicator of emotional competence. For five elementary school-aged children with LI, the production of emotion-based words was analyzed by first determining the frequency of words produced in preintervention sessions for the following categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Following these measures, the participants received 20 intervention sessions over the course of treatment. Treatment involved the use of narratives to address emotion recognition and inferencing abilities. Individual analyses for each participant, including percent of nonoverlapping data (PND), were conducted for each participant in the categories of anger, fear, and surprise, to determine the effects on the production of emotion-based words during the intervention. The results for each participant and emotion category varied greatly, but each participant demonstrated improvement in the PND for at least one emotion category. These results were promising and underscore the value of social communication intervention for children with LI in the area of emotion understanding.