van der Lely, H. K., Payne, E., & McClelland, A. (2011).
An investigation to validate the grammar and phonology screening (GAPS) test to identify children with specific language impairment.
PLoS One ,
6 e22432.
WebsiteAbstractBACKGROUND: The extraordinarily high incidence of grammatical language impairments in developmental disorders suggests that this uniquely human cognitive function is "fragile". Yet our understanding of the neurobiology of grammatical impairments is limited. Furthermore, there is no "gold-standard" to identify grammatical impairments and routine screening is not undertaken. An accurate screening test to identify grammatical abilities would serve the research, health and education communities, further our understanding of developmental disorders, and identify children who need remediation, many of whom are currently un-diagnosed. A potential realistic screening tool that could be widely administered is the Grammar and Phonology Screening (GAPS) test--a 10 minute test that can be administered by professionals and non-professionals alike. Here we provide a further step in evaluating the validity and accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of the GAPS test in identifying children who have Specific Language Impairment (SLI). METHODS AND FINDINGS: We tested three groups of children; two groups aged 3;6-6:6, a typically developing (n = 30) group, and a group diagnosed with SLI: (n = 11) (Young (Y)-SLI), and a further group aged 6;9-8;11 with SLI (Older (O)-SLI) (n = 10) who were above the test age norms. We employed a battery of language assessments including the GAPS test to assess the children's language abilities. For Y-SLI children, analyses revealed a sensitivity and specificity at the 5(th) and 10(th) percentile of 1.00 and 0.98, respectively, and for O-SLI children at the 10(th) and 15(th) percentile .83 and .90, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The findings reveal that the GAPS is highly accurate in identifying impaired vs. non-impaired children up to 6;8 years, and has moderate-to-high accuracy up to 9 years. The results indicate that GAPS is a realistic tool for the early identification of grammatical abilities and impairment in young children. A larger investigation is warranted in children with SLI and other developmental disorders.
PDFvan der Lely, Heather K JPayne, ElisabethMcClelland, Alastair063713/Wellcome Trust/United KingdomResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tUnited StatesPloS onePLoS One. 2011;6(7):e22432. Epub 2011 Jul 28.
van der Lely, H. K., & Marshall, C. R. (2011).
Grammatical-specific language impairment: A window onto domain specificity. In
J. Gouendouzi, F. Loncke, & M. J. Williams (Ed.),
The handbook of psycholinguistics and cognitive processes: Perspectives in communication disorders (Vol. Chapter 20, pp. 401-418) . New York, Psychology Press.
Abstract PDF van der Lely, H. K., Jones, M., & Marshall, C. R. (2011).
Who did Buzz see someone? Grammaticality judgement of wh-questions in typically developing children and children with Grammatical-SLI.
Lingua ,
121, 408-422.
WebsiteAbstractThis paper tests claims that children with Grammatical(G)-SLI are impaired in hierarchical structural dependencies at the clause level and in whatever underlies such dependencies with respect to movement, chain formation and feature checking; that is, their impairment lies in the syntactic computational system itself (the Computational Grammatical Complexity hypothesis proposed by van der Lely in previous work). We use a grammaticality judgement task to test whether G-SLI children's errors in wh-questions are due to the hypothesised impairment in syntactic dependencies at the clause level or lie in more general processes outside the syntactic system, such as working memory capacity. We compare the performance of 14 G-SLI children (aged 10-17 years) with that of 36 younger language-matched controls (aged 5-8 years). We presented matrix wh-subject and object questions balanced for wh-words (who/what/which) that were grammatical, ungrammatical, or semantically inappropriate. Ungrammatical questions contained wh-trace or T-to-C dependency violations that G-SLI children had previously produced in elicitation tasks. G-SLI children, like their language controls, correctly accepted grammatical questions, but rejected semantically inappropriate ones. However, they were significantly impaired in rejecting wh-trace and T-to-C dependency violations. The findings provide further support for the CGC hypothesis that G-SLI children have a core deficit in the computational system itself that affects syntactic dependencies at the clause level.
PDFJournal articleLingua. International review of general linguistics. Revue internationale de linguistique generaleLingua. 2011 Feb;121(3):408-422.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., van der Lely, H., Ramus, F., Sato, Y., Mazuka, R., & Dupoux, E. (2011).
Optical Brain Imaging Reveals General Auditory and Language-Specific Processing in Early Infant Development.
Cerebral Cortex ,
21, 254-261.
WebsiteAbstractThis study uses near-infrared spectroscopy in young infants in order to elucidate the nature of functional cerebral processing for speech. Previous imaging studies of infants' speech perception revealed left-lateralized responses to native language. However, it is unclear if these activations were due to language per se rather than to some low-level acoustic correlate of spoken language. Here we compare native (L1) and non-native (L2) languages with 3 different nonspeech conditions including emotional voices, monkey calls, and phase scrambled sounds that provide more stringent controls. Hemodynamic responses to these stimuli were measured in the temporal areas of Japanese 4 month-olds. The results show clear left-lateralized responses to speech, prominently to L1, as opposed to various activation patterns in the nonspeech conditions. Furthermore, implementing a new analysis method designed for infants, we discovered a slower hemodynamic time course in awake infants. Our results are largely explained by signal-driven auditory processing. However, stronger activations to L1 than to L2 indicate a language-specific neural factor that modulates these responses. This study is the first to discover a significantly higher sensitivity to L1 in 4 month-olds and reveals a neural precursor of the functional specialization for the higher cognitive network.
PDF706KKTimes Cited:2Cited References Count:66
Marshall, C. R., Ramus, F., & van der Lely, H. (2011).
Do children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment compensate for place assimilation? Insight into phonological grammar and representations.
Cogn Neuropsychol ,
27, 563-86.
WebsiteAbstractEnglish speakers have to recognize, for example, that te[m] in te[m] pens is a form of ten, despite place assimilation of the nasal consonant. Children with dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) are commonly proposed to have a phonological deficit, and we investigate whether that deficit extends to place assimilation, as a way of probing phonological representations and phonological grammar. Children with SLI plus dyslexia, SLI only, and dyslexia only listened to sentences containing a target word in different assimilatory contexts-viable, unviable, and no change-and pressed a button to report hearing the target. The dyslexia-only group did not differ from age-matched controls, but the SLI groups showed more limited ability to accurately identify words within sentences. Once this factor was taken into account, the groups did not differ in their ability to compensate for assimilation. The results add to a growing body of evidence that phonological representations are not necessarily impaired in dyslexia. SLI children's results suggest that they too are sensitive to this aspect of phonological grammar, but are more liberal in their acceptance of alternative phonological forms of words. Furthermore, these children's ability to reject alternative phonological forms seems to be primarily limited by their vocabulary size and phonological awareness abilities.
PDFMarshall, Chloe RRamus, Franckvan der Lely, HeatherEnglandCognitive neuropsychologyCogn Neuropsychol. 2011 Oct;27(7):563-86. Epub 2011 Jun 30.