NON-TYPICAL DEVELOPMENT

Purpose of studying impaired populations:

1. To help understand the conditions
o Aid diagnostics of conditions
o Develop treatments and help those with the condition
2. To improve our general understanding of CLA
o By looking at the causes of certain conditions and the consequences – help us
identify the important elements for CLA
o Looking at delays and deviances in atypical development improves our
understanding of typical development

Language development in deaf children

Around 1 in 1000 is born with severe hearing loss. 10% of deaf children are born to deaf
parents. Methods have changed on how to teach deaf children language:
 From purely oral means of teaching to sign languages. Deaf children progress quickly
if they are taught with visuals
 Potentially problematic if a deaf child is born into a hearing household

Sign language depends on the language, they are different among countries. Sign language
is not a simple translation from spoken language; there are differences in their vocabularies,
sometimes what is taken for granted in oral language, cannot be taken for granted in sign
language.

Some facts about sign acquisition

Deaf children are not delayed if presented with language in visual mode. Purely oral
methods don’t work. As deaf children can learn language, we can see that language is not
tied to the aural-oral channel but is a property of the brain.

Different stages of development

Very little research has been carried out. Deaf children undergo early stages similar to
hearing children. Their semantic development similar to hearing children. Syntactic
development is slow if trained in oral methods, but not for signing development.
Home signs – deaf children will invent ‘language’ with consistent signs and word order. It is
the gestural communication system developed by a deaf child who lacks input from a
language model in the family. This is a common experience for deaf children with hearing
parents who are isolated from a sign language community

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Relationship between language and cognition

We can also look at atypical populations in order to potentially shine some light upon one of
our guiding questions in CLA: to LAD or not to LAD? That is the question.
How? Well, most positions in CLA that are more nurture focussed tend to draw upon usage-
based learning and general cognitive mechanisms in their explanations (e.g. Bybee, 2002)
So if we see problems in language happening as well as with problems in general cognition,
this might tell us something.

Language development with SLI

Specific Language Impairment = language developmental disorder (affects ability to

communicate, comprehend and produce); there is some failure/ delay in learning language
that correlates with:
 Average IQ levels
 No known other neurological/ psychological/ social problems
 Adequate opportunity to learn language

Around 5-7% of children affected by some sort of SLI. Symptoms very different. SLI is
identified by using inclusionary and exclusionary criteria:
 Exclusionary criteria more common (Cacace and MacFarland, 1998).
 Defines the SLI on the basis on what is missing in the child’s ability

Specific Language Impairment

SLI is likely to be caused by a genetic factor. Familial incidence is important – but not known
whether a specific gene is affected.
Is SLI the result of what happens when a limited learning mechanism meets a difficult
learning task? It is difficult for the child to process information; the child shows limited
capacity to hold auditory information
Is it a problem with the LAD or with speed of processing required?

KE family (c.f. Newbury and Monaco, 2002); evidence for genetic cause

First discovered at around 1990 (Gopnick and Crago, 1991; Vargha-Khadem at al, 1995).
About half of the family were affected with a SLI. The major phylogenetic consequence was
orofacial dyspraxia, which limits control of fine motor movements in the lower face

It was so severe that the children who were affected were taught signing system (family
specific) to augment their spoken language. The genetic characterisation of the family
highlighted a mutation on one gene – FOXP2

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Assessment

One major assessment tool-kit is the Test of Language Development-2 (Newcomer and
Hamill, 1998)
 Picture Vocabulary — measures a child’s understanding of the meaning of spoken
English words (semantics, listening). The child is shown some images and then is
asked to point which are fruits
 Relational Vocabulary — measures a child’s understanding and ability to orally
express the relationships between two spoken stimulus words (semantics,
organising). The child is shown two columns of word which are related, and he is
asked to match both columns.
 Oral Vocabulary — measures a child’s ability to give oral directions to common
English words that are spoken by the examiner (semantics, speaking). The child is
asked to verbalize an oral direction
 Syntactic Understanding — measures a child’s ability to comprehend the meaning of
sentences (grammar, listening). The child is asked to match the images with its
corresponding definition of the action
 Sentence Imitation — measures a child’s ability to imitate English sentences
(grammar, organising). The child is asked to repeat a sentence; sentences can get
progressively more complex, adding inflection and affixational morphology, passives,
relative clauses, etc. If the child struggles to say it, he may have problems of
articulation, syntactic constructions…
 Morphological Completion — measures a child’s ability to recognise, understand,
and use common English morphological forms (grammar, speaking). WUG test
 Word Discrimination — measures a child’s ability to recognise the differences in
significant speech sounds (phonology, listening). Essentially, getting the children to
perform a minimal pair test – testing their phonological knowledge
 Word Analysis — measures a child’s ability to segment words into smaller phonemic
units (phonology, organising). It can show reading difficulty, phonological delay, early
indication of dyslexia if they are not able to segment the word
 Word Articulation — measures a child’s ability to utter important English speech
sounds (phonology, speaking). How’s the child reading proficiency?

Morphosyntax

A child with SLI shows delay in phonology, morphology, syntax

Within Child Language studies, one common way to measure syntactic development is to
look at Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). Within typical populations the MLU correlates
pretty well with age up to 2.5 – 3 years (Klee 1992)
 So a 1 year old has a MLU of 1
 2 year old = MLU of 2

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  3 year old = MLU of 3

With SLI populations, we see a lower MLU than we would see in a typical population. Their
development will lag behind the typical populations. Up until a MLU of 4 we can use this as
an indicator of SLI.

An extremely well researched area of the language ability of SLI populations is finite verb
morphology (3rd person singular and -ed of regular verbs). It has been demonstrated in a
number of studies that this area of morphology poses significant problems with children
with SLI.
 Inflectional morphology that marks Tense and Person Agreement
o He cooks pasta
o He cooked pasta
In English it is more difficult because the phonological difference is simple; in other
languages this delay does not exist because the difference between tenses is more
salient.
Again, this ability lags behind chronologically-matched populations, and interestingly also
MLU-matched participants (Leonard, 2014: 81). So this cannot be due to simple lexical
acquisition issues

Norbury et al. (2001)

They did a comparison study between 4 different groups:

 SLI group (n=14)
 Children with Mild-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (n=19)
 Chronologically Matched Group (n=20)
 Second language age matched group (n=15)

Why children with hearing loss?

 Researchers were interested in testing two hypotheses concerning SLI
 Extended Optional Infinitive (EOI): in TD children, we also often see lack of inflection,
but for a shorter amount of time. SLI children have incomplete syntactic knowledge,
and so think the inflection is optional for longer
 Surface Hypothesis: In some languages (e.g. Italian), inflections are phonologically
more salient, and we see fewer issues in SLI groups. The issue, then, is one of
perception. Verb inflections are not particularly distinctive for the child, and so are
not learned well.

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Tasks

1. Third Person Singular Tasks

 Children were asked “I want you to tell me things that your friends and family do
every day. I was to know 15 things. I’ll go first to show you what I mean. ‘Every day
Mark watches telly’, or ’Every day my mother gets out of bed.’ Now you try.”
 If children repeated a verb, then they were asked to think of another
 They were given prompts if they struggled to think of any (”what does Daddy do
every morning”)

2. Past Tense Elicitation

 Eight regular past tense verbs (cook-cooked); Eight irregular past tense verbs (eat-
ate); Eight pseudoverbs who similarity to regular verbs encouraged a –ed affixation
(brop – bropped); Eight pseudoverbs derived from irregulars that could take either
(frink – frinked, frink – fronk)
 Asked to form the past tense

Results

Bilingual SLI

Bilingual children affected to the same extent. Will both/all language be affected? Do we see
a “double dealy?”
Bilingual children need to be compared with like, not with monolinguals. Some studies (e.g.
Pradis, 2007) have argued that there is no difference between Monolingual and Bilingual SLI
children

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Moldinov (2010) – Story telling task

It compares linguistic productivity between

monolinguals with SLI, bilinguals with SLI and
bilinguals with normal development.

Down syndrome

Chromosomal abnormality affecting 1 in 800 newborns. Severity: both cognitive and

linguistic can vary greatly. Language is more impaired than other functions. Grammar is
more affected. Production is more affected than comprehension.

Linguistic delay

All stages of development are delayed. Onset of babbling delayed by about two months.
Phonological processes, such as cluster reduction, and final consonant deletion, persist for a
longer period of time (Chapman, 1995)
 TD developing children we see these when they are toddlers
 Down Syndrome children, these can persist till adolescence and adulthood

First word is typically at around 24 months. They have a smaller productive vocabulary than
mentally-aged matched children and use gestures more than TD children. Grammatical
development can take 12 years, while it usually takes around 3 years in TD children.

Communicative competence

Some evidence that in comparison to their expressive abilities, their communicative abilities
are relatively spared.

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Implications for the role of cognition

DS children have general problems with cognition and with language. Language
development stops around age 12 (mental age about 6). Different language components are
affected differently.
What might this tell us about typical language processing? It shows that there must be some
relation/association between cognition and language ability – Against Chomsky’s argument:
LAD, which argues that cognitive and language abilities are separated.

Williams syndrome

The causes of Williams syndrome are not clear, and it is very rare. Results show that children
with Williams syndrome are in same level of mental impairment as DS, with similar IQ
measures. Early research came to the conclusion that linguistic abilities were remarkably
spared in the case of Williams syndrome (e.g. Bellugi et al., 1988).

Linguistic competence

Very rich vocabulary. Very verbal. Striking contrast between severe cognitive deficits and
unusual language abilities. Use infrequent words and can define them. Language rich in
morphology and syntax. Early stages can show delay.

Williams syndrome (18 Y.O.)

(Describing her aims in life.) You are looking at a professional bookwriter. My books will be
filled with drama, action, and excitement. And everyone will want to read them. . . I am
going to write books, page after page, stack after stack. I'm going to start on Monday.

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He shows and IQ of 49, academic ability of a 1 st grader (6-7) and needs constant supervisory
care.

Communicative competence

Good conversational partners but exaggerated eye gaze and highly charged narratives. They
are shown to have problems when questioned about their narratives and problems with
non-literal meaning.

Godbee and Porter (2013)

They looked at the comprehension of sarcasm, metaphor, similies in children with Williams
Syndrome and compared it with controls of Typically developing chronological age matched
(TDCA) and also with typically developing mental age matched controls (TDMA)
 26 participants with WS (14 females, 12 males)
 26 TDCA and 26 TDMA

Measure = Non-literal speech stories

Structure = Introduction -> sarcastic comment -> metaphor -> simile
-> final comment

7/13 literal final comment = test comprehension

6/13 non-literal final comment = mask literal comments (i.e. not actually used to measure
comprehension)

Results

Language development and autism

Spectrum disorder ranging from Asperger’s to severe autism.

 DSM-V (2013) reclassified autism as Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
 Merged Autism, Aspergers, and Pervasive Development Disorder, Not Otherwise
Specified (PDD-NOS)

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Typically 4 times as many boys as girls are affected (Cummings, 2010). The cause not known.
Characteristic features: impaired social development, highly routinized behaviour, atypical
language. Incredible talents: folk myth!

Lower functioning autism

Do not speak or have echolalic

speech.

Some linguistic features

1. Pronoun reversal
o Use of second person pronoun to refer to themselves
o Uses first person pronoun to refer to interlocutor
o Why might this be?
2. Phonological atypicalities (Wolk and Giesen, 2000)
o Occasional increased velarisatoin (/ng/ for /n/)
o Liquids taking on increased fricative pronunciation
o Chronological mismatch – phonemes typical of later development co-
occuring with typically earlier acquired forms. Affricates before nasals

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