Die Rolle des Arbeitsgedächtnisses für die Sprachentwicklung, insbesondere die Wortschatzentwicklung ist mittlerweile überzeugend nachgewiesen (z.B. Hasselhorn & Werner, 2000). Daran anknüpfend beschäftigt sich die vorliegende Studie mit der Wortschatzentwicklung bei dysgrammatisch bzw. spezifisch sprachgestörten Grundschulkindern und mit dem Einfluss des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses auf diesen Entwicklungsprozess. Besonders die Arbeitsgruppe um Gathercole und Baddeley konnten in einer Vielzahl von Arbeiten (z.B. Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990 a, b, 1993) stabile Zusammenhänge zwischen Arbeitsgedächtnis und Wortschatz bzw. Sprache bei normalentwickelten Kindern und spezifisch sprachgestörten Kindern nachweisen. Sie differenzieren 2 Komponenten des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses: den phonetischen Speicher, in dem akustische Informationen 1,5 bis 2 s erhalten bleibt und dann zerfällt, wenn diese Information nicht durch den Rehearsalprozess, eine Art inneres Sprechen wiederholt und damit aufgefrischt und erhalten wird. Das Arbeitsgedächtnis wurde dabei bevorzugt über das Nachsprechen von Kunstwörtern erfasst. Bezüglich dieses Vorgehen gaben z.B. Snowling, Chiat und Hulme (1991) und Bowey (1996, 2001) zu bedenken, dass durch die Komplexität des Kunstwörternachsprechens und die Redundanz zu anderen Aspekten der sprachlichen Verarbeitung der Einfluss des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses überschätzt werden könnte. Sie schlagen daher vor, eher allgemein von phonologischer Verarbeitung zu sprechen und das phonologische Arbeitsgedächtnis nicht davon zu differenzieren, zumindest müsse die Unabhängigkeit des Einflusses des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses von der phonologischen Bewusstheit nachgewiesen werden. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses hängt von den Qualitätsmerkmalen seiner beiden Komponenten ab. Nach Hasselhorn, Grube und Mähler (2000) lassen sich für beide Komponenten jeweils zwei Merkmale identifizieren: Die Qualität des phonetischen Speichers hängt von dessen zeitlich dimensionierter Größe und von der Präzision ab, mit der er akustische Information ablegt und wiedergibt. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des subvokalen Rehearsalprozesses wird von seiner (automatischen) Aktivierbarkeit und seiner Geschwindigkeit bestimmt. Längsschnittlich zeigten Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, & Baddeley (1992) Zusammenhänge zwischen früherem Arbeitsgedächtnis und späterem Wortschatz im Alter bis zu sechs Jahren, im Grundschulalter kehrte sich der Zusammenhang um. Diese Beiträge motivierten die vorliegende Arbeit, in der die Fragen gestellt wurden, ob sich das phonologische Gedächtnis von der phonologischen Verarbeitung im allgemeinen differenzieren lässt, welche Qualitätsmerkmale des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses bei sprachgestörten Kindern defizitär sind und wie sich die Entwicklungsdynamiken zwischen phonologischem Arbeitsgedächtnis und Wortschatz bei sprachgestörten und sprachlich unauffälligen Kindern gestalten. Um dies zu klären, wurde eine Längsschnittstudie realisiert, bei der 64 normalentwickelte und 33 sprachgestörte Kinder im Laufe des ersten und zweiten Grundschuljahres dreimal untersucht wurden; der zweite und dritte Meßzeitpunkt bildeten im wesentlichen die Grundlage der vorliegenden Arbeit. Es fanden sich starke empirische Argumente für die Position, dass Störungen im phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnis eine Hauptursache für die Sprachauffälligkeiten dysgrammatisch-sprachgestörter Kinder sind. Abweichend von den Ergebnissen bei sprachlich unauffälligen Kindern, zeigten die sprachgestörten Kinder geringere Leistungen in allen Bereichen, weniger und niedrigere Korrelationen, das phonologische Arbeitsgedächtnis ließ sich faktorenanalytisch von der phonologischen Bewusstheit und dem phonologischen Langzeitwissen klar trennen. Bei der Betrachtung der vier Merkmale des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses (Hasselhorn, Grube & Mähler, 2000) zeigte sich kein Einsatz der Rehearsalstrategie und eine geringere Geschwindigkeit (letzteres vielleicht auch der Ausdruck eingeschränkter Sprechmotorik, siehe Gathercole, Service et al., 1999). Es gab einen Gruppenunterschied bei der Variablen für die Qualität des phonetischen Speichers. Auch die zeitliche Dimension schien reduziert, die sprachgestörten Kinder zeigten bei langen Kunstwörtern einen größeren Leistungsabfall. Bei verrauscht dargebotenen Kunstwörtern ließ sich nach Ausschluss des Einflusses von Alter und Intelligenz kein Gruppenunterschied mehr nachweisen, der bei unverrauscht dargebotenen Kunstwörtern vorhanden war, so dass die Qualität des phonetischen Speichers eine wesentliche Rolle für die Sprachentwicklung zu spielen scheint. Bei den dysgrammatischen Kindern ließ sich weiterhin eine kausale Asymmerie zwischen phonologischem Arbeitsgedächtnis und Wortschatz finden, dergestalt, dass das frühere phonologische Arbeitsgedächtnis einen größeren Einfluss auf den späteren Wortschatz hatte, als umgekehrt. Diese wurde wegen des Entwicklungsrückstands der sprachgestörten Kinder in dieser Form erwartet, bei den sprachlich-unauffälligen Kindern ließ sich kein Zusammenhang zeigen. Die phonologische Bewusstheit zeigte keinen entwicklungsrelevanten Einfluss auf den Wortschatz. Zusammenfassend ist zu sagen, dass die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Studie die Hypothese stützen, dass die Ursache für kindliche Störungen des Spracherwerbs im phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnis und speziell in der Qualität des phonetischen Speichers zu suchen sind. Literatur Bowey, J. A. (1996). On the association between phonological memory and receptive vocabulary in five-year-olds. Journal of Experimantel Child Psychology, 63(1), 44-78. Bowey, J. A. (2001). Nonword repetition and young children`s receptive vocabulary: a longitudinal study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 441-469. Gathercole, S. E. & Baddeley, A. D. (1990a). Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a cusal connection? Journal of Educational Psychology, 29, 336-360. Gathercole, S. E. & Baddeley, A. D. (1990b). The role of phonological memory in vocabulary acquisition: A study of young children learning new names. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 439-454. Gathercole, S. E. & Baddeley, A. D. (1993). Working memory and language. Hove, UK: Erlbaum. Gathercole, S. E., Service, E., Hitch, G.J., Adams, A.-M. & Martin, A. J. (1999). Phonological short-term memory and vocabulary development: Furter evidence on the nature of relationship. Applied cognitive psychology, 13, 65-77. Gathercole, S. E., Willis, C., Emslie, H., & Baddeley, A. D. (1992). Phonological memory and vocabulary development during the early school years: a longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 28, 887-898. Hasselhorn, M., Grube, D. & Mähler, C. (2000). Theoretisches Rahmenmodell für ein Diagnostikum zur differentiellen Funktionsanalyse des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses. In M. Hasselhorn, W. Schneider & H. Marx, Diagnostik von Lese-Rechtschreib-Schwierigkeiten, Tests und Trends, Bd. 1 (S.167-182). Hogrefe: Göttingen. Hasselhorn, M. & Werner, I. (2000). Zur Bedeutung des phonologischen Arbeitsgedächtnisses für die Sprachentwicklung. In H. Grimm (Hrsg.), Sprachentwicklung (Enzyklopädie der Psychologie, Themenbereich C: Theorie und Forschung, Serie III Sprache, Bd. 3) (S. 363-378). Göttingen: Hogrefe. Snowling, M., Chiat, S., & Hulme. C. (1991). Words, non-words, and phonological processes: Some comments on Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12(3), 369-373.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Some seven percent of children in the general population are affected by Specific Language Impairment and/or Pragmatic Language Impairment with numerous cases undiagnosed. It is known that difficulty in communication affects psychosocial functioning and is likely to be a source of mental distress but the data on people’s access to and benefit from psychological intervention are limited. There is also limited understanding of psychologists’ capacity to meet these clients’ needs although their problems continue into adulthood. This research questions the population of counselling and clinical psychologists about their knowledge and experience of these disorders using an electronic questionnaire. Qualitative methods were then adopted with three participants with SLI/PLI and four psychologist practitioners familiar with such clients; this involved semi-structured interviews analysed using IPA and TA respectively. The purpose was to interpret and develop the clients' lived experiences into themes which were then used to look for possible connecting themes in the psychologists’ transcripts. This process was termed "interconnection" and was intended to reveal the coincidence and convergence of the two sides of the client/psychologist dyad. Results showed that whereas findings demonstrated the young men possessed a spectrum of coping and defence strategies as constituent parts of resilience, including self-esteem, self-identity and self-efficacy, the psychologists did not see the client as a congruent whole, addressing either their impairment or their mental health problem. Client resiliencies were not used in therapy and psychosocial difficulties were not recognised as a focus of distress although they did endeavour to modify their therapeutic approaches. Finally, consideration is given to whether the research aim is met, the implications for counselling psychology and possible future research. It is proposed that this methodology of interconnection has the potential to provide a novel approach to inform any future research and service development for this and other client groups in the way it takes patients/clients into account and connects them with professional working.

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the amount of language models (i.e., dose frequency) that Spanish-English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) require in order to consistently produce challenging target grammatical forms for 6 morphemes, 3 in English and 3 in Spanish, via a structural priming task. Participants included two 2nd grade children with SLI, five typically developing kindergarten children, and three typically developing 2nd grade peers. Participants were administered 10 control and 10 experimental cloze phrase computer tasks for each morpheme. In the control condition participants finished cloze phrase sentences which targeted the target morpheme while in the experimental task participants heard a model of the target morpheme and were subsequently required to finish the cloze phrase. Results replicated results of structural priming for all groups in each language. Results also indicated that Spanish was more robust in producing morphological priming effects in comparison to English morphological forms possibly due to linguistic differences. Clinical and research implications are discussed. / text

Specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual Malaysian children is grossly underidentified for two reasons. First, there is an absence of locally-developed norm-referenced language assessment tools. The challenge in developing a local assessment tool comes from the inadequate knowledge of children’s English as it develops in the bilingual environment. Second, the characteristics of Malaysian English, a non-Standard form of English, are often confused with the features of SLI in monolingual children learning Standard English. To date, the literature has no information on SLI in bilingual children learning a non-Standard English because research mainly focuses on bilingual Standard English and monolingual non-Standard English. Spontaneous language sample is the recommended language assessment tool for bilingual Malaysian children because it provides quantitative and qualitative information for language development and assessment in communities with complex language environment. Phase 1 of the current study investigated the developmental sensitivity of four language sample measures (LSMs), including mean length of utterances (MLU), lexical diversity (D), the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), and frequency of code-switching (FCS), by examining the relationship between these LSMs and age in 52 bilingual Chinese-English Malaysian children with normal language development (NLD), aged between 3;06 and 6;09. Analyses showed a highly significant linear relationship with age in D (r=.536) and IPSyn (r=.451), moderately significant linear relationship with MLU (r=.364), but not in FCS. The findings suggested that MLU, D, and IPSyn were developmentally sensitive to non-Standard English in the bilingual Malaysian children studied. Phase 2 compared the same measures obtained from nine children with SLI and their age-matched controls from the NLD group in Phase 1. The SLI group had significantly lower MLU and the IPSyn scores than the NLD group. Discriminant function analysis indicated that the IPSyn alone classified children into SLI and NLD groups at 77.8% classification accuracy. The four misclassified children, two in the SLI and two in the NLD group, were aged below 4;06 years. MLU and the IPSyn showed potential as SLI markers for bilingual Malaysian children. Two types of error patterns were observed from the SLI group. The first pattern included verb and the copula -be omissions which were also observed in younger children from the NLD group. The second pattern was omission of prepositions which was not observed in younger NLD group, reflected linguistic transfer from the first language. Future research in this area is suggested to a) extend the age range of the study to include older children to further verify the diagnostic potential of LSMs, b) consider longitudinal research design so that language development over time can be described and c) include non-linguistic measures given reports of these measures as potential markers of SLI. As an initial study on bilingual children learning non-Standard English, the current study provided empirical data for charting language development and also suggested potential markers for SLI. The study can serve as the basic framework not only for further research on other bilingual non-Standard English-speaking groups but also for children with language impairment secondary to developmental disorders in the same language group. / published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

The primarily goal of this study was to examine the patterns of cognitive and language processing of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and how they related to their text comprehension, interpreted within constructivism. The study aimed to characterize the difference in language, character decoding, metacognitive processing and text comprehension between children with SLI and those under typical development; to identify the inter-relationships among their language processing, character decoding, metacognitive processing and text comprehension; and to investigate how the implementation of cognitive reading strategies instruction change their language processing, character decoding, metacognitive processing, belief towards reading and text comprehension. Two studies were carried out. In Study One, 73 participants were recruited from two Hong Kong primary schools; they were at second and third grade, 42 were diagnosed of SLI and the other were under typical development. Standardized instruments were used to tap children’s language processing and character decoding respectively. Researcher developed Metacognitive Processing Scale were adopted to rate their metacognitive and deep processing of text. A set of comprehension test, comprised of forced-choice inferential questions and two recall tasks, were used to assess their depth in understanding different types of text. Analyses indicated that SLI students did not only score poorer in language processing, but also in character decoding, metacognitive processing and text comprehension. Further analyses of both the entire sample and the SLI sample, indicated that there were significant correlations between character decoding, language processing, metacognitive processing with children’s text comprehension scores. In Study Two, there were 40 participants recruited from the SLI sample of the Study One. Cognitive reading strategy instruction program were developed. 21 participants was randomly selected to receive the experimental instruction and the another 19 were under conventional instruction as control. Besides the measures used in the Study One, interviews and teacher-reporting questionnaires were used to tap children’s belief towards reading and their classroom engagement. Analysis of pre-instruction and post-instruction tests indicated the experimental children showed significantly better progress on their oral language, text comprehension and belief about reading. Both the experimental and the control group showed similar progress on character decoding. The study offers both theoretical and educational contribution on the literacy development among the population of SLI. It identifies the role of metacognitive processing on literacy achievement. It provides the evidence of implementing cognitively-based reading strategies for literacy instruction for children with SLI within Chinese context. Upon the introduction of inclusive education, teachers now face students with much wider diversity, including a significant number of children with SLI. Possible collaboration between frontline teachers and speech therapists in designing potential classroom activities is discussed. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

The current study investigated the effectiveness of a Literacy Based Intervention (LBI) on English Language Learners (ELLs) with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Specifically this report focuses on the effects of LBI on vocabulary skills (e.g. naming and defining). Nineteen ELLs (ages 74 to 104 months) participated in the intervention study, which lasted eight weeks and consisted of 50-minute sessions, three times a week. The LBI focused on rich vocabulary instruction of words that were from storybook readings. Vocabulary naming and definition probes were used to assess vocabulary progress. Results revealed that vocabulary increases did not occur until the second half of the intervention (e.g. week six or seven). LBI shows promise to be successful for increasing vocabulary skills in ELLs with SLI. / text

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

Variability inherently present between multiple talkers can prove beneficial in the context of learning. However, the performance during learning paradigms by children with specific language impairment (SLI) remains below typically developing peers, even when multiple talkers are used. Preschool children with typically developing language (n = 17) and SLI (n = 17) participated in a talker discrimination task. Five different pairings of talkers (same male, different males, same female, different females, male + female) were used to present 50 spoken words. Children with SLI were significantly poorer in discriminating same and different male speakers compared to their typical peers. The present findings demonstrate that preschool children with SLI can experience difficulty distinguishing between talkers. Poor sensitivity to variation in talkers may contribute to poor learning in SLI for contexts where multiple talker input should benefit the learner.

The procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) posits that a range of language, cognitive and motor impairments associated with specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia (DD) may be explained by an underlying domain-general dysfunction of the procedural memory system. In contrast, declarative memory is hypothesized to remain intact and to play a compensatory role in the two disorders. The studies in the present thesis were designed to test this hypothesis. Study I examined non-language procedural memory, specifically implicit sequence learning, in children with SLI. It was shown that children with poor performance on tests of grammar were impaired at consolidation of procedural memory compared to children with normal grammar. These findings support the PDH and are line with previous studies suggesting a link between grammar processing and procedural memory. In Study II, the same implicit sequence learning paradigm was used to test procedural memory in children with DD. The DD group showed a learning profile that was similar to that of children with SLI in Study I, with a significant impairment emerging late in learning, after extended practice and including an overnight interval. Further analyses suggested that the DD impairment may not be related to overnight consolidation but to the effects of further practice beyond the initial practice session. In contrast to the predictions of the PDH, the sequence learning deficit was unrelated to phonological processing skills as assessed with a nonword repetition task. Study III examined declarative memory in DD. The performance of the DD group was found to be not only intact, but even enhanced, compared to that of the control children. The results encourage further studies on the potential of declarative memory to compensate for the reading problems in DD. In sum, the results lend partial support for the PDH and suggest further refinements to the theory. Collectively, the studies emphasize the importance of going beyond a narrow focus on language learning and memory functions in the characterization of the two disorders. Such a broader cognitive, motor and language approach may inform the development of future clinical and pedagogical assessment and intervention practices for SLI and DD.