Flashcards School Age Language Disorders Midterm

Speech

the production of vocal sounds, a process that involves both motor and linguistic skills

Communication

an umbrella term that includes speech and language - encompasses the broader set of nonverbal and verbal ways on conveying information and emotions

Language

involves the comprehension and use of words and sentences to convey ideas and information - can occur in different modalities

Language disorder

- proposed for children who are likely to have language problems enduring into middle childhood and beyond, with a significant impact on everyday social interactions or educational progress

- an impairment in 'comprehension and/or use of spoken, written, and/or other symbol system'

Developmental Language Delay

refers to "cases of language disorder with no known differentiating condition"

Co-occurring disorders

- are impairments in cognitive, sensorineural, or behavioral domains that can co-occur with DLD

- these disorders may affect the pattern of language impairment and response to treatment

Developmental

refers to the fact that the condition emerges during the course of development vs. being acquired or associated with a known biomedical cause

Language delay

used to describe language problems experienced by some toddlers and preschoolers

Delayed

implies that the child will catch up to peers without intervention, which is not the case for children with DLD

Language Learning Disorder (LLD)

- refers to school-aged children with primary DLDs that coexist with literacy disorders

- used to call attention to the consequences of their academic achievement difficulties

Functional specialization

certain neural networks that are finely tuned for certain types of processing

Neural plasticity

the brain's ability to recognize itself is greatest in children

Naturalistic perspective

a person's performance is compared to an average level of performance

Normative perspective

- which you consider the impact of the language impairment on a child's overall level of function

- considers society's values and expectations concerning behavior

Dynamic assessment

designed to manipulate context in order to support a student's performance so that an optimal level of achievement can be identified

Functional assessment

designed to determine how a student's communication skill improvement has yielded functional change

Generalizing

carrying newly acquired skills over into real-life contexts

Fast mapping

period of rapid incidental learning

Complex sentences

contain more than one verb phrase in embedded or conjoined multi-clause utterances

Some of the deficits that appear to be related to memory or semantic ability may actually stem from "underground" phonological skills, particularly the ability to:

segment, store, and retrieve words from memory on the basis of their phonological properties

Why is it difficult to directly compare outcomes on different standardized tests?

- they were not normed on the same group

- they have different psychometric properties

What are three things that can help ensure the fairness of standardized tests?

- choose tests that are psychometrically sound

- interpret test results properly and judiciously

- use appropriately for diagnostic purposes

What does research suggest that are equally amendable to change?

the language forms that a child does not display at all and those that are used correctly

Milieu Teaching bends operant principles of:

- imitation

- modeling

- reinforcement with natural settings

What are the three components of Milieu Teaching?

- environmental arrangements

- responsive interaction

- conversational-based context

What are the prognostic indicators of persistent language difficulties among children under 3?

- children who fail to combine words at 24 months appear to have worse outcomes than those who do not produce any words at 15 months

- prognosis is poorer for children who have limited pre-linguistic skills

- a positive history of language or literacy problems is a risk factor

What are the prognostic indicators of persistent language difficulties among children 3-4 years old?

- the greater the number of areas of language function impaired, the higher the likelihood is that the problem will persist

- there is a good prognosis for children whose difficulties are restricted to expressive phonology

What are the prognostic indicators of persistent language difficulties among children 5 years and older?

- language problems that are still evident at 5 years and older are likely to persist

- negative prognosis indicators = receptive language impairment and low nonverbal abilities

What are some tasks that can be used to measure non-verbal intelligence?

- analogies

- categories

- sequences

- interaction with toys

- picture identification

- emotions/feelings (facial expressions)

What are the main cognitive theories of DLD?

- procedural memory

- declarative memory

What is important for rule-based learning and includes grammar (learned implicitly)?

procedural memory

What is important for knowledge-based learning and includes vocabulary, learning facts, and associations?

declarative memory

Who are at a slightly higher risk than females for DLD, with a ratio of 1:33:1?

males

DLD prevalence estimates range from _______ depending on the age and diagnostic criteria.

3-7%

__________ receives far less research funding than conditions such as ADHD and ASD relative to their severity and prevalence.

language disorders

DLD is under diagnosed with almost ______ children with language-related impairment not receiving proper diagnosis or treatment

3 in 4

DLD is _____ more likely than ASD

2.5x

Presence of a language disorder tends to be ______ over time

stable

The nature of a language disorder is very likely to _____.

change

What percentile score corresponds with the median?

percentile rank of 50

What are standardized assessments designed to show?

whether there is a meaningful discrepancy between a student's scores and their peers

What is the average range for a standardized assessment score?

+/- 1 standard deviation above/below the mean

Morphosyntactic characteristics

deficits in comprehension and production of complex syntax are widely reported in children with language disorders

Pragmatic characteristics

- limited verbal fluency, prone to disruptions, false starts, mazes, and other forms of dysfluency

- reduced ability to use language for a variety of functions

- difficulty repairing communication breakdowns

Pragmatic deficits seem to go ___________.

beyond those attributable to their structural difficulties

What are the two passive sentences?

- a student is seen by a teacher

- the cat was chased by the dog

Declarative sentences are easier than _______.

interrogative

What sentence structures are simpler than those with multiple embedded clauses?

simple compound sentences

What are some concerns regarding language sampling as an assessment procedure?

- time-consuming

- segmenting utterances is not highly reliable

- verbal language sample is not always a good representation of a child's language

When should you include an assessment of semantic relations in your evaluation for children with language difficulties?

when a student is using a few syntactically well-formed complex sentences, complete an analysis of semantic relations between clauses

What assessments contain an assessment for semantic relations?

- CELF-5

- Test of Language Competence: Expanded Edition

- TOLD: Intermediate (TOLD-I)

How does IDEA define the term 'evaluation'?

the initial process of establishing eligibility for educational services

How does IDEA define the term 'assessment'?

the rest of the appraisal process, following the evaluation

What is the academic shift that happens in fourth grade?

students use reading as a tool to learn new information

What is the academic shift that happens in seventh grade?

this is the stage when school expectations shift from allowing students time to develop basic skills to assuming that those skills are acquired and ready to be independently applied

Which type of text elicits the maximum level of syntactic complexity?

persuasive texts

What is a T-Unit?

one main clause with all the subordinate clauses and non-clausal phrases attached to or embedded in it

Does spoken or written language T-Unit length change more drastically from 6-12th grade?

written language

Differentiating conditions

- biomedical conditions in which language disorder

occurs as part of a more complex pattern of impairments

- language disorders associated with X

What are some types of differentiating conditions?

- brain injury

- acquired epileptic aphasia in childhood

- certain neurodegenerative conditions

- cerebral palsy

- oral language limitations associated with sensorineural hearing loss

- genetic conditions

How is metalinguistic defined?

relates to the ability of a person to refelct on, consciously think about, and discuss oral and written language and how it is used

What do metalinguistic awareness skills include?

- segmenting sentences into words and words into syllables and phonemes

- detecting lexical and structural ambiguities

- judging the syntactic and semantic appropriateness of a sentence

What is the Theory of Mind?

the ability to think about mental states, including both your own and those of others

What is register variation?

a student's ability to change their register depending on who they are speaking to and the setting reflects knowledge of the different age, status, and communicative competencies of various listeners

What is presupposition skills?

- entails an implicit assumption about the background knowledge of the listener

- refers to a person's ability to decide what level of detail needs to be expressed

What is an example of a presupposition skill?

I used presupposition to assume I did not need to provide you with a formal definition of pragmatic language for today's lecture

What is the zone of proximal development?

distance between a child's current level of independent function and the potential level of performance

What is narrative MACROstructure?

- children with LLD tend to produce stories with reduced macrostructure maturity

- the degree of organization, number and types of story grammar elements, and cohesive devices

What is narrative MICROstructure?

- includes elements such as vocabulary and sentence structures used

What are some of the strongest indicators or productivity and complexity in a narrative?

- number of different words

- total number of words

- total number of T-units in a narrative

- average number of words per T-unit

- number of complex sentences

- proportion of complex sentences (subordinate index)

What does contextualized mean?

- the ability to infer the meaning of a new word from the linguistic cues that accompany it

- refers to communication that is embedded in a specific context, where the meaning of words and phrases is supported by the surrounding environment, activities, or social situation

What does decontextualized mean?

is language used to talk about things not directly visible or occurring in the immediate environment

What is a norm-referenced assessment?

is a standardized instrument developed and administered to a large, statistically representative sample of people (the norm group) of the same age or grade level

What is a standardized assessment?

- Most formal, decontextualized format for assessment of language function

- Norm-referenced scores are included

- These are designed to show whether there is a meaningful discrepancy between a student's scores and their peers

What is a criterion-referenced assessment?

- Designed not to compare a client's performance to other client's achievement, but only to determine whether the child can attain a certain level of performance

- Allows us to look at specific communicative behaviors in depth and to individualize the assessment for a particular student

- Includes a structural analysis of a student's spoken or written language

What is a dynamic assessment?

- designed to manipulate context in order to support a student's performance so that an optimal level of achievement can be identified

- conduct this type of assessment by engaging a student in a learning situation

What is an Individual Transition Plan (ITP)?

- similar to IEPs, are required by the IDEA legislation

- it addresses progress toward high school graduation, outlines the post-secondary education or training the student needs, discusses the community-living support required, and makes preliminary plans to help the student succeed in employment and daily living settings

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes first (most implicit)?

bombardment

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes second?

modeling

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes third?

recasting

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes fourth?

focused stimulation

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes fifth?

imitation

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes sixth?

complex sentence treatment

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes seventh?

Meta Taal

When ordering most implicit to most explicit treatment approaches, which approach comes eighth (most explicit)?

shape coding

What is the purpose of elicited production activities?

to probe for forms that are absent in spontaneous speech

What are some things that you would look for when selecting a strong standardized language assessment tool?

- appropriate

- reliable

- valid

What are the advantages of clinician-directed interventions?

- allows the clinician to maximize the opportunities for a child to produce a new form

- unnaturalness is actually beneficial; if clients were going to learn language the "natural" way, they would not need intervention

What are the disadvantages of clinician-directed intervention?

- meta-analysis showed that natural intervention had a consistent advantage over clinician-directed methods

- difficulty generalizing to natural contexts

What are the advantages of client-directed intervention?

- can be good for an unassertive or headstrong child

- good for children with MLU below three morphemes (can be effective to use in tandem with more structured intervention activities)

What are the disadvantages of client-directed intervention?

- some clinicians report discomfort with the approach (possibly because of relinquishing control)

- to be effective, this approach must provide high levels of input intensity