Language delay, SLI and interventions Aylin Küntay Language and Communicative Disorders Meeting 12

Persistent vs. transient lang problems If 2-year-olds are below the 15th percentile on at least 2 of the below 3 measures Vocabulary Grammar Use of abstract language But a substantial proportion showed spontaneous improvement Also, some children who will fall into the “difficulty” group at 4 were not classified as delayed at age 2 Twins

Heritable vs. nonheritable environments Early language delay tended to persist when parents expressed concern 2-year-old language delay appears largely environmental, when their parents do not go on to seek professional help

Autism vs. SLI Some common characteristics Failure in nonword repetition Pragmatic language difficulties SLI inherits a genetic risk factor, which affects a certain brain system and leads to structural language impairments ASD is the result of inheritance of 3 separable genetic risk factor Abnormal language use Impairment of social interaction Restricted behavioral repertoire The resulting phenotype in ASD has the potential to limit linguistic development, including phonological short term memory

Weismer Most SLI come from late talkers Should we do early intervention? Effective interventions? Who will benefit? Debate concerning clinical management Wait-and-see Watch-and-see (close monitoring)

Intervention Parental training Modeling Modeling plus evoked production Effects on grammatical measures (SALT type) Socialization skills Parental stress

Predicting who needs treatment Has to do with identifying transient vs. persistent language difficulties Difficulties in processing and acquisition of novel words Limited processing capacity (Leonard)

Intervention on the basis of limited processing capacity perspective Rate of speech Vocal stress Use of visual cues accompanying spoken language Factors that will increase the attentional resources for language processing

Novel word learning task Sam, the space man, will teach you some new words such as blick, gorp about some unusual objects Production probes What’s this? Comprehension probes Put Sam by the blick

Novel word learning task Rate manipulations improved the production of novel words Use of gestures also helped

Wait times Manipulate wait time after questions Benefited mostly in narrative tasks, which are cognitively taxing Increases accuracy and fluency

Script-based intervention 3 script routines and 3 non-script activites that targeted comprehension of 2 constructions Agent-action-object and action-object-location Beter outcome with script-based training

Conclusions Do not tax cognitive resources, reduce processing load Use “in phonology” words as the first items to teach For narratives, use familiar mental models and scripts with easier vocabulary and less complex constructions Monitor speaking rate and wait times; use emphatic stress on new words