Narratives in SLI, early focal injury, and WS Aylin Küntay Language and Communicative Disorders Meeting 12

Study Cross-population method Narrative methodology Early (prenatal or perinatal) focal brain damage SLI WS Narrative methodology 4 to 12 years (cross-sectional) 4 to 6 7 to 9 10 to 12

Investigated frog stories Morphosyntactic domain Morphological errors (Appendix b, p. 244) Use of complex syntax (b.2.) Frequency Syntactic diversity Narrative domain Number of story components (thematic elements; seacrh theme) Evaluation (b.3.)

Development of hemispheric specialization Equipotentiality hyp LH is not priviliged for lang processing at birth Invariance hyp irreversible determinism: LH is innately and irrevervibly specialized for lang Evidence for both Processing studies Childhood aphasia NOT like adult aphasia Brain damaged children catch up with normal brain children in language dev

Focal brain injury studies Many children with LH damage progress to normal language levels No significant difference between LH damaged and RH damaged children in eventual language outcomes Potential explanations: equipotentiality in early years, with later development of lateralization Or emergentism Emergence of lateralization

Emergentism The two hemispheres are characterized by “soft” biases at birth, permitting neural and behavioral reorganization across the course of lang development Time of lesion onset matters Lesion size matters Possible contribution of RH to analysis in the initial stages of lang dev LH specialization is en emergent outcome

SLI vs. FL In the 4-6 age range, both produced fewer types of complex syntax than TD Same for 7-8 But by 10-12, FL performed witin the normal range SLI continued to lag behing

SLI vs. WS: morphosyntactic measures Despite cognitive impairment, WS masters the morphology of English, as do children who are specifically language impaired, but who are not mentally retarded WS approaches TD by 10-12 years of age in producing the same repertoire of complex syntactic devices

SLI vs. WS: narrative measures Despite similar morphosyntactic profiles, they exhibit different profiles in both cognitive and social components of narrative ability SLI catch up with TD in inferencing, cognitive component of evaluation WS lags behind because of cognitive impairment WS displays more social engagement devices than both SLI and TD (Table 7, 241) hypersociability

Discussion Neural plasticity in language development How general impairment (WS) may affect language development Components of language development