A method for assessing the use of first person verb forms by preschool-aged children with SLI

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily illustrated through drawings, which tend to have third person subjects. In this paper we describe a method that has been successful in creating obligatory contexts for a first person morpheme -auxiliary am -that heretofore has been assessed exclusively through spontaneous speech samples. Participants were 32 mainstream American English-speaking children comprising three diagnostic subgroups: children with SLI, typically developing age-matched peers, and younger typically developing peers matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). The children participated in a task in which they described their actions for an audience; these descriptions required the use of auxiliary am. The results revealed that the children with SLI used auxiliary am with significantly smaller percentages than both groups of typically developing children, a finding that is consistent with findings that employ other tense and agreement morphemes. Clinical applications of this method are discussed.

Linguistic Constraints on Children's Overt Marking of BE by Dialect and Age

“…In Polite and Leonard (2007), rates of overt marking for am were above 90% for both age groups of typically developing children. In Leonard et al (2003), an age but not BE form effect was observed when the children's combined rates of overtly marked is and are were compared to their combined rates of overtly marked was and were .…”

“…Finally, Leonard and colleagues examined the effects of person, number, and tense on children's rates of overt marking in two studies that included speakers of MAE (Leonard et al, 2003; Polite & Leonard, 2007). The first included 45 children, aged 3 to 5 years, and the second included 32 children, aged 4 to 6 years.…”

The effect of time on word learning: An examination of decay of the memory trace and vocal rehearsal in children with and without specific language impairment

“…This criterion was used because the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) sets the IQ portion of the criteria for mental retardation at <70 +/− 1 SEM for the test employed. A number of researchers have historically used a higher-cutoff score for nonverbal IQ (e.g., Polite & Leonard, 2007; Rice, Redmond, & Hoffman, 2006; Mainela-Arnold & Evans, 2005). In this investigation, the 75 cut-off score was used because of accumulating research documenting the lack of evidence for treating children with developmental language impairment whose performance IQs are below 85 but not in the intellectually disabled range as different from those who obtain performance IQ scores at or above 85.…”

Test validity in morphosyntactic measures for typical and SLI incipient Spanish–English bilinguals

“…This could be a byproduct of the type of stimulus used, picture description, which makes it harder to prompt first or second person. To study these forms, spontaneous or semi-spontaneous discourse has been used: Aguado-Orea and Pine (2015) or Polite and Leonard (2007). See Grinstead, De la Mora, Vega-Mendoza, and Flores (2009) for an original solution to the problem in an elicited task with puppets.…”