Speech Language Pathology

Reblogs, reflections and other resources relating to the science, research, and popular culture of Speech Language Pathology. Quick Links Therapy Ideas: Early Intervention ASL

[just-shower-thoughts]

Are similar hand gestures in sign language the same as rhyming?

[speechlanguage-blog]

Kind of.

[ceeana-blog]

An article about the 30 million word gap by age three.

[speechlanguage-blog]

Speech Therapy Materials Online

http://www.speakingofspeech.com/Materials_Exchange.html

http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster2/sptherapy.html

http://www.speechtherapyideas.com/

http://www.playingwithwords365.com/freebies/

http://slpmaterials.blogspot.com/

http://mommyspeechtherapy.com/

http://www.speechiefreebies.com/

[neurosciencestuff]

Children with Autism Who Live With Pets Are More Assertive

Dogs and other pets play an important role in individuals’ social lives, and they can act as catalysts for social interaction, previous research has shown. Although much media attention has focused on how dogs can improve the social skills of children with autism, a University of Missouri researcher recently found that children with autism have stronger social skills when any kind of pet lived in the home.

“When I compared the social skills of children with autism who lived with dogs to those who did not, the children with dogs appeared to have greater social skills,” said Gretchen Carlisle, research fellow at the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction (ReCHAI) in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine. “More significantly, however, the data revealed that children with any kind of pet in the home reported being more likely to engage in behaviors such as introducing themselves, asking for information or responding to other people’s questions. These kinds of social skills typically are difficult for kids with autism, but this study showed children’s assertiveness was greater if they lived with a pet.”

Pets often serve as “social lubricants,” Carlisle said. When pets are present in social settings or a classroom, children talk and engage more with one another. This effect also seems to apply to children with autism and could account for their increased assertiveness when the children are living in a home with pets, Carlisle said.

“When children with disabilities take their service dogs out in public, other kids stop and engage,” Carlisle said. “Kids with autism don’t always readily engage with others, but if there’s a pet in the home that the child is bonded with and a visitor starts asking about the pet, the child may be more likely to respond.”

Carlisle also found that children’s social skills increased the longer a family had owned a dog, yet older children rated their relationships with their dogs as weaker. When children were asked, they reported the strongest attachments to smaller dogs, Carlisle found.

“Finding children with autism to be more strongly bonded to smaller dogs, and parents reporting strong attachments between their children and other pets, such as rabbits or cats, serves as evidence that other types of pets could benefit children with autism as well,” Carlisle said.

Carlisle surveyed 70 families who had children with autism between the ages of 8 and 18.The children were patients at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Almost 70 percent of the families that participated had dogs, and about half of the families had cats. Other pets owned by participants included fish, farm animals, rodents, rabbits, reptiles, a bird and even one spider.

“Dogs are good for some kids with autism but might not be the best option for every child,” Carlisle said. “Kids with autism are highly individual and unique, so some other animals may provide just as much benefit as dogs. Though parents may assume having dogs are best to help their children, my data show greater social skills for children with autism who live in homes with any type of pet.”

“The Social Skills and Attachment to Dogs of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder” was published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

[neurosciencestuff]

Try, try again? Study says no

When it comes to learning languages, adults and children have different strengths. Adults excel at absorbing the vocabulary needed to navigate a grocery store or order food in a restaurant, but children have an uncanny ability to pick up on subtle nuances of language that often elude adults. Within months of living in a foreign country, a young child may speak a second language like a native speaker.

Brain structure plays an important role in this “sensitive period” for learning language, which is believed to end around adolescence. The young brain is equipped with neural circuits that can analyze sounds and build a coherent set of rules for constructing words and sentences out of those sounds. Once these language structures are established, it’s difficult to build another one for a new language.

In a new study, a team of neuroscientists and psychologists led by Amy Finn, a postdoc at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has found evidence for another factor that contributes to adults’ language difficulties: When learning certain elements of language, adults’ more highly developed cognitive skills actually get in the way. The researchers discovered that the harder adults tried to learn an artificial language, the worse they were at deciphering the language’s morphology — the structure and deployment of linguistic units such as root words, suffixes, and prefixes.

“We found that effort helps you in most situations, for things like figuring out what the units of language that you need to know are, and basic ordering of elements. But when trying to learn morphology, at least in this artificial language we created, it’s actually worse when you try,” Finn says.

Finn and colleagues from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia describe their findings in the July 21 issue of PLoS One. Carla Hudson Kam, an associate professor of linguistics at British Columbia, is the paper’s senior author.

Too much brainpower

Linguists have known for decades that children are skilled at absorbing certain tricky elements of language, such as irregular past participles (examples of which, in English, include “gone” and “been”) or complicated verb tenses like the subjunctive.

“Children will ultimately perform better than adults in terms of their command of the grammar and the structural components of language — some of the more idiosyncratic, difficult-to-articulate aspects of language that even most native speakers don’t have conscious awareness of,” Finn says.

In 1990, linguist Elissa Newport hypothesized that adults have trouble learning those nuances because they try to analyze too much information at once. Adults have a much more highly developed prefrontal cortex than children, and they tend to throw all of that brainpower at learning a second language. This high-powered processing may actually interfere with certain elements of learning language.

“It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, but there hasn’t been any data that experimentally show that it’s true,” Finn says.

Finn and her colleagues designed an experiment to test whether exerting more effort would help or hinder success. First, they created nine nonsense words, each with two syllables. Each word fell into one of three categories (A, B, and C), defined by the order of consonant and vowel sounds.

Study subjects listened to the artificial language for about 10 minutes. One group of subjects was told not to overanalyze what they heard, but not to tune it out either. To help them not overthink the language, they were given the option of completing a puzzle or coloring while they listened. The other group was told to try to identify the words they were hearing.

Each group heard the same recording, which was a series of three-word sequences — first a word from category A, then one from category B, then category C — with no pauses between words. Previous studies have shown that adults, babies, and even monkeys can parse this kind of information into word units, a task known as word segmentation.

Subjects from both groups were successful at word segmentation, although the group that tried harder performed a little better. Both groups also performed well in a task called word ordering, which required subjects to choose between a correct word sequence (ABC) and an incorrect sequence (such as ACB) of words they had previously heard.

The final test measured skill in identifying the language’s morphology. The researchers played a three-word sequence that included a word the subjects had not heard before, but which fit into one of the three categories. When asked to judge whether this new word was in the correct location, the subjects who had been asked to pay closer attention to the original word stream performed much worse than those who had listened more passively.

“This research is exciting because it provides evidence indicating that effortful learning leads to different results depending upon the kind of information learners are trying to master,” says Michael Ramscar, a professor of linguistics at the University of Tübingen who was not part of the research team. “The results indicate that learning to identify relatively simple parts of language, such as words, is facilitated by effortful learning, whereas learning more complex aspects of language, such as grammatical features, is impeded by effortful learning.”

Turning off effort

The findings support a theory of language acquisition that suggests that some parts of language are learned through procedural memory, while others are learned through declarative memory. Under this theory, declarative memory, which stores knowledge and facts, would be more useful for learning vocabulary and certain rules of grammar. Procedural memory, which guides tasks we perform without conscious awareness of how we learned them, would be more useful for learning subtle rules related to language morphology.

“It’s likely to be the procedural memory system that’s really important for learning these difficult morphological aspects of language. In fact, when you use the declarative memory system, it doesn’t help you, it harms you,” Finn says.

Still unresolved is the question of whether adults can overcome this language-learning obstacle. Finn says she does not have a good answer yet but she is now testing the effects of “turning off” the adult prefrontal cortex using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Other interventions she plans to study include distracting the prefrontal cortex by forcing it to perform other tasks while language is heard, and treating subjects with drugs that impair activity in that brain region.

[neurosciencestuff]

A study of 473 sets of twins followed since birth found that compared with single-born children, 47 percent of 24-month-old identical twins had language delay compared with 31 percent of nonidentical twins. Overall, twins had twice the rate of late language emergence of single-born children. None...

[speechlanguage-blog]

How Early Intervention can Make a Difference How Early Intervention Makes a Difference Topics: Hearing Loss, Deaf, Early Intervention, Mentorship, Research, Gallaudent

[speechlanguage-blog]

Click through for myths: References: Bilingual Myths References Caesar, M.J. & Kohler, P.D. (2007). The State of school-based bilingual assessment: Actual practice versus recommended guidelines. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 38, 190-200. Campos, S.J. (1995). The Carpenteria preschool program: A long-term effects study. In E.E Garcia & B. McLaughlin (Eds.), Meeting the challenge of linguistic and cultural diversity in early childhood education (pp. 34-48). New York: Teachers and College Press. Craig, H.C, Zhang, L., Hensel, S.L., & Quinn, E.J. (2009). African American English-Speaking students: an examination of the relationship between dialect shifting and reading outcomes. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52, 839-855. Gutiérrez-Clellen, V.F. (1999). Language Choice in Intervention With Bilingual Children. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 8, 291-302. Holm, A., Dodd, B., Stow, C., and Pert, S. (1999). Identification and differential diagnosis of phonological disorder in bilingual children. Language Testing 1999, 16, 271-292. Kohnert, K., Yim, D., Nett, K., & Kan, P.F. (2005). Intervention with linguistically diverse preschool children: A focus on developing home language. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 36, 251-263. Lugo-Neris, M.J., Jackson, C.W. & Goldstein, H. (2010). Facilitating vocabulary acquisition with young English language learners. Speech, Language, and Hearing Services in Schools, 41, 314-327. Marinova-Todd, S., Bradford Marshall, D., & Snow, C. (2000). Three misconceptions about age and L2 learning. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 9-33. Paradis, J., Crago, M., Genesee F., & Rice, M. (2003). French-English bilingual children with SLI: How do they compare with their monolingual peers? American Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 46, 113-127. Patterson, A.L. (1998)). Expressive Vocabulary Development and Word Combinations of Spanish-English Bilingual Toddlers. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 7, 46-56. Pearson, B.Z., Fernandez, S.C., & Oller, D.K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43, 93-120. Perozzi, J.A. & Chavez Sanchez, M.L. (1992). The effect of instruction in L1 on receptive acquisition of L2 for bilingual children with language delay. Language Speech Hearing Services in Schools, 23, 348-352. Pettito, L.A., & Holowka, S. (2002). Evaluating attributions of delay and confusion in young bilinguals: Special insights from infants acquiring a signed and spoken language. Sign Language Studies, 3, 4-33. Restrepo, M.A., & Silverman, S.W. (2001). Validity of the Spanish Preschool Language Scale-3 for Use With Bilingual Children. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 10, 382-393. Rubin, J. (1975). What the “good language learner” can teach us. TESOL Quarterly, 9, 41-50. Shin, S. & Milroy, L. (2000). Conversational codeswitching among Korean-English bilingual children. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 4, 351-383.

[ohchickpea-blog]

[thelegalizeddeafies]

“Yes, there is a Santa and he speaks every languages…”

My hope for humanity has restored!

Love and peace!

[ewitty]

Story-signing Strategies

ASL & English Literacy

[speechlanguage-blog]

Story reading techniques to use with any child!!!

[speechlanguage-blog]

Technical Report #7 2001 by Deborah Chen, Ph.D., Professor California State University, Northridge Visual Impairment In Young Children: A Review Of The Literature With Implications For Working With Families Of Diverse Cultural And Linguistic Backgrounds

[speech-path-way]

Great short description of aphasia and some simple explanation on how it affects the brain

[speechlanguage-blog]

Check out this great application that is free for a limited time! It normally costs about 45-50 dollars.

[speechlanguage-blog]

Pedia staff has a great page full of resources.

[ewitty]

Ava (24 months old) BSL Dinner Chat

National Deaf Children’s’ Society (NDCS) Sign Up Campaign - please enjoy the video AND sign the petition! Only takes a few seconds, literally. Thank you so much! http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/7763 

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How does this confirm or change your existing perspectives on Deaf Education? Sign language? Natural language? ‘Deafness’?  What you were taught in your Speech and Language Pathology classes? Deaf babies? Cochlear Implants?

Please pass this video around as much as you can.

[1260hours]

Source: Playing with Words 365