Specific Language Impairment (Sli)
Specific Language Impairment (Sli)
Specific Language Impairment (Sli)
Since the 1960s, the following terms have appeared in the literature:
Rapin and Allen (1987) speculated that six possible grouping for children
with SLI might better describe the diversity of disorder.
In a later paper, Rapin (1996) noted that these six sub groupings
probably could be consolidated into three groups :
1. Expressive language disorder
2. Expressive receptive language disorder
3. Higher order processing disorder
Etiology
Researchers are frequently only in a position of identifying “risk factor”
that is, factors that tend to co-occur with the presence of SLI which can
only be thought as potential cause.
Risk factors include:-
Genetics
Difference in brain structure and function
Environmental variable
Linguistic and cognitive account
Processing factors.
A) GENETICS
Genetic origins of SLI have probably been suspected for the years
by any one who has encountered families in which language
problems seem more common place than one might expect given
the relative exceptionality of language impairment.
But many children with SLI come from families in which the - the
family members of proband (an affected person) has never had a
deficit in language ability.
But there are genetic connections, and now that we are aware of them
more evidences follow:-
Several different types of studies are used to study the genetic basis of
those that are used to the greatest extent are “familial studies”, “Twin
studies” Pedigree studies.
In fraternal twins (who are no more genetically related than a pair of
siblings and than average 50% of their genetic makeup),it would be more
likely that the result is environmental rather genetic influences.
In pedigree studies, as many members as possible of a single proband’s
multigenerational family are examined in order to get an insight into the
pattern inheritance associated with the targeted characteristic or
disorder.
Familial studies either use the questionnaire method or the direct
assessment method to assess the language skills. The latter has been
proven to be more useful.
Further family histories of SLI may be more common among children
with expressive problems only than among those with both receptive and
expressive problems (Lahey and Edward 1995).
C) ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLE
1) Most of the evidence come from studies in which children with SLI are
compared with control children who are similar in age. These studies
suggest that their conversation partners (parents, other adults and peers
alike) make allowances for their diminished language skills and are
thus reacting to rather than causing the children problems.
For e.g. Mother of SLI may use shorter utterances (especially incases
where both comprehensions and expressions were affected or asked
fewer questions) during structural task compared to mothers of normally
developing children (Cunningham et al 1985).
E) PROCESSING FACTORS
• Rapid, sequenced visual and tactile stimuli also difficult for children with
SLI to interpret.
• Short term auditory sequential memory for item order and problem
solving of complex reasoning tasks are affected in children with SLI
(Kamhi & Gentry 1990)
Early Lexicon:
Children with SLI appear to be late in acquiring their first words.
• Most of evidence comes from early case studies like Reader (1940)-
observed child who found it difficult to produce 1st word until 4 years
Werner (1945)reported of child who did not use first word until after 5
years of age.
• The finding that children with SLI acquire their first words at a later
expected age is not surprising, but it is not logically necessary.
By the time children with SLI begin to produce multi word utterances,
their lexical abilities are not so easily characterized as matching those of
younger normally developing children.
Verbs, in particular, begin to show deficiencies. Walkins, Rice and Moltz
(1993) found that preschool age children with SLI used a more limited
variety of verbs than age matched controls, though they used with high
frequency (e.g. go, get, put, want)
• In one study, they did not extend these words to new references to the
degree in the control children, but some appropriate extensions were
observed and in another study, so were overextensions.
• Rice Buhr and Nameth (1990) The children with SLI showed poorer over
all mapping ability on a comprehension task than did both age control MLU
controls. The names of actions were especially difficult for each group of
children.
• Study done by Oetting Rice Swank (1995) revealed that the school age
child with SLI learned object names almost as well as did age controls, but
their learn action names fell well below that of their same age peers.
• Frequent circumlocution
• Naming errors
• Studies done from the 1960s – 1970s have revealed that age of first word
combinations appears to be later in children with SLI than in normally
developing children. Studies have reported word combination that reflects
rather narrow meaning in children with SLI (Leonard, 1984)
Morphosyntax
Syntactic structure
• Lee (1996) found that children with SLI did not use some of the
constructions seen in the speech of normally developing children,
suggesting that children with SLI possessed at a more restricted set of
syntactic rules.
• Ingram (1970, 1973) compared children with SLI with a MLU matched
children. The 2 groups were found to be similar in the syntactic rules
reflected in their speech, with a few important exceptions. The children
with SLI did not use major syntactic categories (e.g. noun, verb embedded
sentence) in as many different sentence contexts, on average as the MLU
controls.
Grammatical Morphology
Children with SLI are late in acquiring the segments of the language.
Segment that are acquired early by normally developing children (e.g.
/n/, /m/, /b/, /w/) are like the first to be acquired by children with SLI,
at a later age.
Segments that are acquired later by normally developing children
(e.g./s/v/) can continue to be difficult for children with SLI
Distinctive features
An obvious shortening of segment analysis is that each consonant and
vowel treated as if it were independent of all others. Yet clinicians and
researchers recognize that some segments are more similar than others
and hence more problems might easily be due to problem with the shared
characteristic.
To capture this information investigators began to apply distinctive
feature analysis the early 1970s. The most frequently adopted distinctive
feature system was that Chomsky and Halle (1968) in which similarities
and differences are represented by binary values.
The distinctive feature patterns represented in the speech of children
with resemble those seen in the speech of younger normally developing
children. However, there are two possible differences.
The best documented difference between children with SLI and younger
normally developing children concerns (+voice). Although children with
SLI are not as proficient as their same age peers in their ability to produce
voicing contrasts (eg coal-goal) (Catts & Jensen, 1983) this aspect of
phonology seems to be a relative strength in these children, at least in
word initial or prevocalic position.
• Similar findings have been reported when the voicing contrast was
measured in terms of voice onset time (VOT). Farmer and florance
(1977) found that a group of children with SLI showed VOT values for
word initial stops that approximated those seen for normally developing
children of the same age.
Unusual errors
• It appears that children with SLI are more likey than younger normally
developing children to produce errors of an unusual nature (Leonard
1985) some of these are cases of presumably later developing sounds
replacing presumably earlier developing sounds (e.g. v/for /d/)
(Grunwell, 1981, Leonard and Brown 1989)
• Some unusual errors involve the use of consonants not found in the
ambient language. Example of SLI with speaking English include use of
nasal frication and snorts, alveolar fricatives, ingressive lateral and
alveolar fricatives.
Pragmatics
The pragmatic skills of children with SLI have been examined primarily
within dialogue and within narrative discourse.
Within dialogue:
Requesting and commenting
Presuppositional referencing
Verbal and non verbal turn taking
Responding
Referencing presuppositions
• Speakers make assumptions about what their listeners know and do not.
Presuppositions refer to speakers back grounding and for grounding of
information for the listeners
Responding
Gallaghar and Barton (1978) examined responses of SLI children to the
neutral “what”? form of requests for clarification.
The children seemed to recognize that they needed to do something to
their utterance to clarify the message for their partner when requested to
do so.
Brenton et al (1986) examined the response of children with SLI to
requests clarification and found that the subjects with SLI recognized the
obligatory nature of request and again no response rates were low for
both subjects with language disorders and age matched controls with
normal language. The translation of the response into an appropriate
linguistic form distinguished the SLI and normal language subject groups.
The children with SLI produced more inappropriate responses than the
children with normal language. SLI children were not able to add
information to their recordings and did attempt verbally probe the nature
of the problem experienced by the listener as normally developing
children.
ASSESSMENT OF CHILDREN WITH SLI
Binay Kant (2004) developed an assessment protocol for children with SLI to
assess and identify the subgroups in children with SLI. The following
tests were administered to aid an diagnosis and sub grouping of SLI
Vocabulary skills
Auditory discrimination skills.
The child who is late to begin talking, both in terms of acquisition of first
and production of first word combinations, may be at particular risk for
the development of SLI.
References
Berntein D.K (2002) language and communication disorders (5th ed)
Bopston Pearson education company
Broston: Pearton Education Company.
Hegde M.N. (1996). Course book on language Disorders in children San
Diego Singular publishing Graus
Leonard, LB (1998) children with specific language impairment London
MIT press
Nelson NW (1998) childhood language disorders in context infancy
through adolescence (2nd ed) Viacom Company
Paul.R. (2001). Language disorders from infancy theory Adolescence
assessment and intervention (2nd ed )