Intervention for Children with Language Delay: Insights from Typical Language Acquisition

1. Intervention forChildren with Language Delay:Insights fromTypical Language Acquisition Matthew Saxton November 1st 2006

2. Collaborators Eleri Bevan Julie Dockrell Jo van Herwegen James Law

3. Specific Language Impairment • “when a child fails to make normal progress in language learning for no obvious reason”Bishop (2004, p.309) • no other developmental or sensory deficits • normal IQ • no hearing or visual impairment • no childhood schizophrenia, infantile autism, neurological causes

4. Incidence and Impact of SLI • 7% of children • oral language • literacy • numeracy • behaviour • peer relations

5. Complex Aetiology • deficits can occur at every level of language: • phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, pragmatics • many different profiles of delay and disorder

6. Diagnosis • diverse approaches: • clinical judgements • language test batteries • cognitive tests • tests of sensory functioning

7. Problems in Assessment • assessment batteries often incomplete • populations of children included vary • no statistical analyses • clinical judgements only

8. Causes of SLI • linguistic: • sparse morphology hypothesis • optional finiteness marking on Vs • domain general: • Rapid Auditory Processing deficit • limited working memory

9. Consequences of SLI • need for evidence-based intervention • insights from research on Typical Language (TL) development • corrective input for morphological errors

10. Morphosyntactic Deficits • It’s a flying finches, they are. • She remembered when she hurts herself the other day. • The boys eat four cookie. • Carol is cry in the church.

11. Morphosyntactic Errors • universal feature of typical development also • errors of omission and commission: • I want apple. • I breaked a glass.

12. Typical Language Development • all TL children make errors • all TL children eventually retreat from error

13. Negative Evidence • evidence that a given structure is ungrammatical • parental corrections of child errors

14. ‘No Negative Evidence’ Problem • longstanding assumption: • parents do not correct their children’s errors • ‘no negative evidence’ Cazden (1965), Brown & Hanlon (1970)

15. “A basic premise of almost all work on language acquisition in a generative framework is that learning must progress without the aid of overt correction ― that is, the learner will not receive "negative evidence," in the form of adult feedback telling the child that his or her utterances do not conform with those of the adult grammar.” Weissenborn, Goodluck & Roeper (1992:9)

16. Does it Matter? • ‘no negative evidence’ assumption • “ ... one of the most important discoveries in the history of psychology” (Pinker, 1988, p.104)

17. Argument fromPoverty of Stimulus (APS) • ‘no negative evidence’: • traditional empirical support for APS

18. Empirical Support for APS it depends what counts as negative evidence Brown & Hanlon (1970: 202): parental Approval and Disapproval: Eve: Mama isn’t boy, he a girl. Mother: Yes, that’s right.

19. There is not “even a shred of evidence that approval and disapproval are contingent on syntactic correctness.” Brown & Hanlon (1970:201)

20. Possible Forms of Correction signal of disapproval? a meaningful pause or look? explicit grammar lesson? clarification requests? a direct contrast between child and adult forms?

21. Beyond Disapproval “repeats of ill-formed utterances usually contained corrections and so could be instructive.” Brown & Hanlon (1970:197)

22. Diary Study • Matthew with Alex (aged 4 years) • aim: deliberately correct child’s errors and gauge effect

23. A: That .... that ... that says you can’t go there. M: Hmm. A: That says you can’t go there. M:Why can’t you go there? A: ‘Cos that’s the part who you / l / .... who you see .... M: It’s the .... A: .... over. M: It’s the part where you what? A:Where you look over.

24. A: I’m easy to eat you up. M: You can eat me up easily? A: Yeah. M: What? A: I can eat you up.... [ bang ] M: I bet you can’t. A: I bet you I .... I, I, I can. I bet you can’t eat me up easily.

25. M: What you doing? A: I’m rolling about. M: You’re spinning round, are you? A: I’m rolling .... I’m spinning around .... .... on your chair. M: Hmm.

26. M: You have to shut the doors / w / in winter. A: Yeah, but I don’t want to. It’s too bored if I shut the door every day. M: It’s not boring. A: It is. M: What do you mean? A: What? M: Why do you say that? A: Because it’s .... because it’s .... too.... It’s too boring.

27. Direct Contrast Hypothesis • Child: He was the baddest one. Adult: Yeah, he sounds like the worst. • juxtaposition of erroneous and correct forms: • unique discourse context • child may perceive adult form as being in contrast with their own

28. Empirical Support for the Contrast Theory I • experimental and observational(Farrar, 1992; Saxton, 1997) • mother, father and siblings(Strapp, 1999) • immediate and longer-term effects(Saxton, 2000; Saxton et al., 1998)

29. Empirical Support II • beyond L1 English: Japanese, Korean, French(Izumi, 2002; Chouinard & Clark, 2003;O’Grady & Lee, 2006) • second language acquisition(Mackey et al., 2003)

30. APS Revisited • no empirical support for ‘no negative evidence’ assumption • of little value in specifying principles of Universal Grammar

31. Current Project • evidence-based: • intervention based on negative evidence • targeted: • specific aspects of language difficultyselected (morphosyntax)

32. Selection Criteria I • no reported hearing difficulties or neuro-motor problems • language test scores: • 1.5 or more SDs below the norm • above 5th percentile on block building (British Abilities Scale)

33. Selection Criteria II • no evidence of pronounced speech articulation difficulties • no marked pragmatic difficulties • error-rates for target structures higher than those found in TL children

34. Intervention Regime • negative evidence supplied for six weeks • assessment: • pre-, mid- and post-intervention • expressive language: hexagon task • receptive language: grammaticality judgement task

35. Grammaticality Judgement Task • do children reject sentences with missing morphemes? • copula • auxiliary verbs • articles

36. Summary • language delay is a significant problem for many children • interventions need to be evidence-based and targeted • the Contrast theory provides an evidence base for intervention • current project findings: watch this space.....