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

2. 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

3. 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.)

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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 years of age in producing the same repertoire of complex syntactic devices

9. 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

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