Late talkers (Delayed Onset) Aylin Küntay Language and Communicative Disorders Meeting 9

Language learning--- normal vs. late children stand out who do not pass these stages with the same ease as their normally developing counterparts. It is still difficult to distinguish those children who will overcome the initial delay from those who will show persistent language impairments. Research on late talkers has successfully identified some risk factors, i.e. characteristics that indicate whether an improvement is to be expected or whether the presence of persisting language impairment is likely. However, current research does not yet support prioritizing or weighting these characteristics

LT vs. NL Same chronological age; bayley scores; SES; Sex; ethnic heritae Used MCDI Found delayed onset of vocabulary Scoring in the lowest 10th percentile for productive vocabularies (LT) How about grammatical skills of late talkers? No relation is syntax is independent from lexicon

Grammatical skills of LTs Later entry into syntax No selective delays in the acquisition of verbs But lexical and grammatical skills are related As in typicals 2 distinct clusters Catch up with the typicals Remained lower in both lexical and grammatical

The syntax-lexicon continuum ‘Constructions can be thought of as the same theoretical type of representation object as lexical items, albeit syntactically complex and at least partially schematic. There is a CONTINUUM between the lexicon and syntactic constructions’ (Croft, 2001: 16-17).

Preschool Language Scale- 3rd edition (PLS-3) The Preschool Language Scale (PLS-3) was developed as a diagnostic instrument of language development for infants and young children. This test is appropriate for children between the ages of 2 weeks and 6 years, 11 months. There are two subscales: Auditory Comprehension and Expressive Communication. These scales measure receptive and expressive language skills, respectively. The PLS-3 provides age-based standard scores, percentile ranks, and age equivalents for three areas, including Auditory Comprehension, Expressive Communication, and Total Language.

The Test of Language Development­Primary, Third Edition (TOLD­P:3) has nine subtests that measure different components of spoken language. Picture Vocabulary, Relational Vocabulary, and Oral Vocabulary assess the understanding and meaningful use of spoken words. Grammatic Understanding, Sentence Imitation, and Grammatic Completion assess differing aspects of grammar. Word Articulation, Phonemic Analysis, and Word Discrimination are supplemental subtests that measure the abilities to say words correctly and to distinguish between words that sound similar.

Age 3;6 35% of LTs enrolled in speech-language treatment at this age 25% were late bloomers When you factor in SES, nonverbal intelligence, expressive language and novel word comprehension Get very good sensitivity Being able to predict positive cases of SLI

Age 5;6 Only very few late talkers qualified for a diagnosis of SLI But still some comprehension difficulties among LTs Sentence imitation tasks Nonword repetition task But where does SLI come from, if not from late talkers?

Children’s Nonword Repetition Test child listens to spoken nonwords and repeats, e.g. 2 syllables: hampent 3 syllables: dopelate 4 syllables: confrantually 5 syllables: pristoractional Gathercole et al, 1994

What to do? (from Liz Bates, email communication) The general recommendation by people like Leslie Rescorla, Donna Thal and others who have worked with "late talkers" is to refer for further testing (starting with a hearing test) any child who has reached 24 months and still has fewer than 50 words is not combining words

SLI 7% of children (8% of boys and 6% of girls) aged 5 to 6 years meet the definition of SLI (Tomblin et. al., 1997) Only about 29% of parents of the affected children reported they were previously informed that their child had a speech or language problem Often undiagnosed