Child Language Disorders (Birth to 5) Exam 1

What are the major achievements in Form during infancy?

Infant speech perception, critical period, social neural commitment

What is infant speech perception

infants are born with the innate capacity to differentiate speech sounds across all languages

What is the critical period for infants?

Language learning and phonetic discrimination have a critical period from birth to 7 years where the neural elasticity is maximal. This is 8 to 10 months and it is where babies become sensitive to patterns in language.

What is social neural commitment in infancy?

statistical learning requires human interaction and that babies do not learn language structures from audio or video recordings alone

What are the early vocalizations (stark's stages)

reflexive stage, control of phonation stage, expansion stage, control of articulation stage, canonical syllables stage, advanced forms stage

Reflexive stage

automatic, vegetative sounds like crying, burping, and coughing

Control of Phonation Stage

production of cooing and gooing

Expansion stage

vocal play, screaming, and sound prolongation

Control of articualtion stage

marginal babbling

Canonical syllables stage

expression of true babbling containing consonant-vowel combinations

Advanced forms stage

jargon babbling featuring adult-like intonation patterns and complex syllable shapes

What are the major achievements in content during infancy?

development of initial receptive vocabulary, understanding of object persistence via cognitive advances in Piaget's sensorimotor stage

What are the major achievements in use during infancy?

transition from pre-intention to intention communication, development of social cognition and joint engagement

What are the major achievements in form during toddlerhood?

transitions from single word utterances to multi word utterances (18-24 mos), early emergence of grammatical morphemes, increasing MLU

What are the major achievements in content during toddlerhood?

Vocabulary burst, semantic errors including overextensions and underextensions, fast mapping

What is the vocabulary burst during toddlerhood?

rapid acquisition of expressive vocabulary following the 50 word landmark

What are the major achievements in use during toddlerhood?

expansion of communication functions and emergence of explicit imperative and declarative pointing

What are the communicative functions in toddlerhood?

requesting, protesting, greeting, commenting

What are the major achievements in form during preschool?

Brown's stages and syntactic elaboration

Brown's Stage III (~31 months):

sentence structures become more complex

Brown's Stage IV (~35 months):

Embedding of phrases and clauses

Brown's Stage V (~41 months):

mastery of complex grammatical morphemes ( irregular 3rd person, un/contractible compula, auxiliary forms)

Brown's Stage Post V (~54 months):

advanced sentence coordination and subordination

What is syntactic elaboration?

development of increasingly adult-like sentence types

What are the major achievements in content during preschool?

acquisition of complex relational terminology

Acquisition of complex relational terminology:

Spatial and Locational terms, temporal terms, physical dimensions, distance terms, kinship terms

What are spacial and locational terms?

next to, behind, under

What are the temporal terms?

before, after, when

What are physical dimensions?

big/small, long/short, thick/thin

What are the distance terms

farther away, near

What are the major achievements in use during preschool?

development of conversational repair mechanisms, narrative abilities, and topic maintenance across multiple turns

What is Piaget's cognitive theory?

language acquisition is driven by underlying cognitive development and domain-general learning mechanisms. Language emerges as a symbolic representation of cognitive concepts learned through active environment exploration

What is the primary focus of Piaget's cognitive theory?

semantics and cognitive schema

What is Skinner's behavioral theory?

language is an operant behavior learned through environmental reinforcement, conditioning, imitation, and shaping. Classical and operant conditioning establish verbal behavior pathways

What is the primary focus of Skinner's behavioral theory?

form and functional verbal operants

What is Vygotsky's social interactionist theory?

language acquisition occurs through social interaction with more capable peers or caregivers within the Zone of Proximal Development and it emphasizes on social cognition, joint attention, and culture

What is the primary focus of Vygotsky's social interactionist theory?

pragmatics and social function

What is Chomsky's nativist theory?

language is an innate biological capacity unique to humans, children possess a language acquisition device containing universal grammar rules that unfold naturally with environmental exposure.

What is the primary focus of Chomsky's nativist theory?

syntax and morphology

What are the features of child-directed speech?

characterized by higher pitch, exaggerated pitch contours, slower tempo, vowel elongation, and magnified facial expressions

What are the effects of child-directed speech?

It enhances infant selective attention, aids speech perception, facilitates phonetic boundary detection, and highlights word segmentation boundaries.

What is joint attention?

shared attentional focus between a child, an adult, and an object or event

In order, what are the stages of joint attention?

following attention and behavior, directing attention and behavior, and coordinated/shared attention

What age does following attention and behavior emerge?

Around 6 months

What age does directing attention and behavior emerge?

Around 9-12 months (via gaze shifting and pointing)

What age does coordinated/shared attention emerge?

Around 13-14 months

What is supported joint engagement?

When the caregiver holds or directs the infant's focus on an object without the infant explicitly acknowledging the caregiver's visual gaze or focus

What is coordinated joint engagement?

The child actively toggles attention back and forth between the communication partner and the object of interest, acknowledging the shared experience.

What are the 2 types of pointing?

Imperative and declarative

What is imperative pointing?

used as a request to demand an object, action, or assistance from an adult

What is declarative pointing?

Used to draw another person's attention to an objet or even for social sharing, commenting, or interest. This emerges after imperative pointing and represents higher social cognition

What are the 2 types of babbling?

Reduplicated and Variegated/nonreduplicated

What is reduplicated babbling?

repetitive sequences of identical consonant-vowel combinations

What is variegated/ nonreduplicated babbling?

Syllable strings with varying consonants and vowels

What are the types of semantic mapping?

fast and extended

What is fast mapping?

Initial connection made between a new word and its referent after a single or limited exposure

What is extended mapping?

complete, detailed understanding and mental representation of a word's full semantic boundaries, including relationships to other words

What are the types of semantic errors?

overextension and underextension

What is overextension?

applying a categorical word too broadly to include non-members of that category based on perceptual or functional similarities (EX: calling all four legged animals "doggy")

What is underextension?

Defining a word too narrowly, restricting its application to a specific context or instance (EX: using cat only to refer to the family pet, not other cats)

What is a free morpheme?

Meaningful linguistic units that can stand alone as independent words (EX: cat, run, big)

What is a bound morpheme?

Grammatical markers that cannot stand alone and must attach to a free morpheme to alter its meaning or grammatical class (EX: plural -s, past tense -ed, possessive 's)

When do morphemes emerge?

Basic bound morphemes (present progressive -ing, plural -s, prepositions in/on) emerge before 36 months

Un/contractible copulas, auxiliaries, and complex inflectional markers emerge after 36 months

What is MLU?

Mean Length of Utterance

What does MLU measure?

the average number of morphemes produced per utterance, serving as an index of syntactic and morphological complexity

What is TNW?

Total number of words

What does TNW measure?

total count of all words produced in a language sample, measuring conversational productivity

What is NDW?

number of different words

What does NDW measure?

Count of unique, non-repeated words in a sample, serving as a measure of semantic diversity and vocabulary variation.

What is TTR?

Type-token Ratio

What does TTR measure and what is the formula?

measures semantic variability

NDW/TNW= TTR

What is executive function?

A top-down cognitive process required for goal-directed behavior, self-regulation, and adaptive task performance

What is inhibitory control?

the ability to suppress automatic responses, filter out distractions, and control impulsivity

What is an example of inhibitory control?

A preschooler waiting quietly for their turn during a circle time game without interrupting or grabbing a toy out of another child's hands

What is working memory?

The capacity to hold and manipulate information actively in mind over short intervals

What is an example of working memory?

A child following a two-step multi-part instruction without needing a prompt or repetition

What is cognitive flexibility?

The ability to switch attention between different rules, contexts, or perspectives smoothly

What is an example of cognitive flexibility?

A child playing a sorting game who successfully switches from sorting blocks by color to sorting blocks by shape when instructed

What is emergent literacy?

The foundational knowledge, skills, and attitudes that precede formal reading and writing instruction

What are the primary achievements in emergent literacy for preschoolers?

print awareness, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge

What is print awareness?

Understanding the forms, functions, and conventions of print

What is phonological awareness?

Sensitivity to and explicit awareness of the sound structure of spoken language, independent of meaning

What is alphabet knowledge?

Understanding the names, shapes, and sounds associated with letter symbols

What are the hypotheses regarding order of alphabet acquisition?

own-name advantage, letter-name pronunciation effect, letter-order hypothesis, consonant-order hypothesis

What is own-name advantage?

children tend to learn and master the letters contained within their own personal names prior to learning other alphabet letters

What is letter-name pronunciation effect?

Letters whose written names include their corresponding spoken sound phoneme

What is letter-order hypothesis?

Alphabet letters situated early in the alphabetical sequence are acquired earlier than letters appearing later in the sequence due to linear memorization patterns

What is consonant-order hypothesis?

Letters representing consonants that emerge earlier in natural speech-sound development are learned as printed letters before those representing later-emerging speech-sounds

What is cognitive referencing?

the practice of comparing a child's language abilities to their non-verbal mental age to determine eligibility for language intervention

What is the clinical issue with cognitive referencing?

It is widely rejected by professional guidelines because language performance can exceed non-verbal cognitive scores do not accurately predict intervention outcomes or potential benefit from therapy.

Define Speech

the neuromuscular execution and acoustic production of oral language sounds

Define language

A rule-governed, share symbolic system used to represent thoughts, ideas, and concepts

Define Communication

The broad process of exchanging information, needs, ideas, and emotions between individuals across verbal, non-verbal, gesture, or graphic modalities

What is the ASHA definition of a language disorder?

a significant impairment in the acquisition and use of language across modalities due to deficits in comprehension and/or production across any of the five language domains

What is the ICF framework 5.1.?

The world health organization's classification of functioning, disability and health focuses on how a condition impacts everyday life and functioning rather than relying solely on standardized test scores

What does the ICF framework evaluate?

5.2.1 body functions and structures, 5.2.2 activities and participation, 5.2.3. contextual factors

What is a language disorder?

Broad term for any condition in which language development is compromised across modalities or domains, causing functional daily impairment

What is developmental language disorder?

Specific diagnostic category used when a language impairment causes functional daily communication problems and occurs without an associated, differentiating biomedical condition

What is language disorder associated with condition X?

Applied when language impairment occurs as part of a complex symptom associated with an underlying biomedical condition

What are the affects of DLD?

persistent difficulty understanding and using spoken/written language