Causal sentence production in children with language impairments

Abstract

Although 5-7-year-old children with language impairments have causal expressions in their repertoire, they have marked and extensive problems in using these expressions appropriately and in producing full causal sentences even when these are modelled for them. Given the educational importance of explanation, there is a clear need for interventions to target both the semantic appropriateness of causal sentence production and the frequency of use of causal connectives, especially in contexts where children have to cope with the additional processing demands associated with producing two-clause sentences and/or with producing causal sentences autonomously.

The sentence repetition task: A powerful diagnostic tool for French children with specific language impairment

“…The FUNC score was calculated using the number of pronouns, possessives, relatives, conjunctions, prepositions, and determiners that were accurately repeated. Specific difficulties in this area are in line with previous studies, revealing omissions of obligatory relative markers (Schuele & Dykes, 2005), causal connectives (Donaldson et al, 2007), clitic pronouns (Hamann et al, 2003;Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut, & Gerard, 1998), and prepositions (Grela, Rashiti, & Soares, 2004). Finally, results showed very frequent verb inflection errors in children with SLI, with no child performing better than À1.22 SD under the expected norms.…”

“…However, the optimal cut-off scores for the three more specific scoring measures -SYNT, FUNC and MORPH -were more stringent, revealing a specific locus of weakness in children with SLI. A specific deficit in producing complex syntax is in line with previous studies showing problems when coordinating the production of more than one clause, including relative clauses, causal sentences, and full prepositional clauses (Donaldson, Reid, & Murray, 2007;Riches et al, 2010;Schuele & Dykes, 2005). The FUNC score was calculated using the number of pronouns, possessives, relatives, conjunctions, prepositions, and determiners that were accurately repeated.…”

Language intervention for causal adverbial production and science content learning

“…As with other types of multiclausal utterances, children with SLI are likely to exhibit late emergence and less frequent use of causal adverbials than typically developing peers. Five to eight year old children with SLI demonstrate an increased rate of clause omission or use of incorrect conjunctions in causal adverbial production tasks, especially in tasks with heavy processing demands (Donaldson et al, 2007). In addition, children with SLI are more likely than TD peers to produce grammatical errors in sentences with causal adverbials (Owen, 2010).…”

“…School-age children with SLI tend to exhibit typical performance as compared to peers in tasks that require production of single-clause causal adverbial structures, such as responding with "Because…" to a "Why?" question (Donaldson et al, 2007).…”

“…Utterances containing adverbial clauses are likely to exhibit errors in grammar (Owen, 2010) or cause-effect (Donaldson, Reid, & Murray, 2007). Spoken language difficulties are exacerbated in written tasks (Scott & Windsor, 2000).…”