Putting Struggling Readers on the PHAST Track

Lovett, M.W., Lacerenza, L., & Borden, S.L. (2000). Putting struggling readers on the PHAST track: A program to integrate phonological and strategy-based remedial reading instruction and maximize outcomes. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 33, 458-476.

Children with reading disabilities are frequently found to have phonological processing deficits. Phonological awareness, the ability to isolate and manipulate sounds in the language is particularly problematic for children with reading disabilities. Interventions addressing phonological awareness have been found to be effective.

In this article, the authors review a program of research leading to the development and testing of the PHAST (Phonological and Strategy Training) remedial reading program. The PHAST represents a merging of programs based on phonological analysis and blending, and word identification strategies. Early research by this group indicated that teaching all of the relevant strategies from these programs was more effective then only some, that different skills improved based on the different strategies taught, and that a combined rather than strictly sequential approach to the teaching of these strategies was most effective. The authors then go on to describe their PHAST program, which was designed to implement these best practices in reading remediation incorporating teaching of both specific and metacognitive skills for improving word reading.

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

The Impact of Dual Tasking on Sentence Comprehension in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Leclercq, A. L., Majerus, S., Prigent, G, & Maillart, C. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56, 265-280.

It has been thought that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have poor attention, which may sometimes be the cause of their poor performance on language tasks. In this study, the authors argue that comprehending sentences may be especially taxing on one’s mental resources for attention. Comprehending a sentence involves engaging in multiple processes including: Processing the words as you hear them, accessing long-term memory for word meaning, and maintaining and updating the products of the sentence while still interpreting and incorporating incoming information. In order to manipulate this complex set of information, the child needs to have sufficient attention.

In the present study, the authors used a dual-task paradigm to asses how attention was related to sentence processing capacities in children with SLI and typically develop children. The sentence comprehension task was the primary task, and an interfering non-verbal task, presumed to tax one’s attentional resources, was the secondary task. Performance of children with SLI was compared to age-matched and grammar-matched control groups. It was hypothesized that while engaging in the attentionally-demanding secondary task, the performance of the children with SLI on the primary sentence recall task would be especially impaired because of a resource-sharing trade-off.

The results of this study revealed that children with SLI have poor attentional capacity. For children with SLI and their grammatical controls, performance on the sentence comprehension task was impaired when they were also engaged in the secondary non-verbal task. However, these results do not support the hypothesis that poor attentional abilities are a core deficit in SLI. Rather, because children with SLI and younger, grammar matched controls demonstrated similar levels of performance on the dual task, it was suggested that SLI is characterized by a slowed development of attentional and language domains, rather than an attention deficit.

These findings suggest that the development of attention in children with SLI may lag behind their peers, and this does have implications for their language abilities.

Blogger: Nicolette Noonan is a Master’s student in the Speech and Language Sciences program.

Assessment and Treatment of Working Memory Deficits in School-Age Children: The Role of the Speech-Language Pathologist

Boudreau, D., & Costanza-Smith, A. (2011). Assessment and treatment of working memory deficits in school-age children: The role of the speech-language pathologist. Language, Speech, and Hearing Sciences in Schools, 42, 152-166.

This article provides a clinically useful summary of working memory theory, relationship to language and language impairment, and assessment and intervention issues.

Working memory refers to the temporary storage and processing of information. Working memory is considered to have both domain-specific short-term storage (memory) systems for holding information in mind, and a domain-general central executive responsible for controlling attention and allocating resources (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). The short-term memory system responsible for holding phonological information in mind, phonological short-term memory, is thought to play an important role in the learning of new word forms (Gathercole, 2006). Working memory for phonological/verbal information taps both phonological short-term memory and the central executive, and is referred to as functional working memory by Boudreau and Costanza-Smith. Functional working memory has been found to be related to more complex skills such as language comprehension and academic achievement. As well, poor phonological short-term memory and functional working memory have been implicated in language impairment given evidence that children with language impairment do poorly on such tasks.

Clinicians may find information about a child’s phonological short-term memory and functional memory are in psychoeducational assessment reports. In addition, standardized tests of phonological processing and language sometimes include tasks that tap these processes. Evidence regarding working memory intervention is reviewed along with classroom strategies that may facilitate learning in children with weak working memory.

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

In Two Minds: Dual-Process Accounts of Reasoning

Evans, J.S. (2003). In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 7 (10), 454-459.

Sometimes we take action before we’ve even realized we’re thinking about it. We hold our hand out to catch a ball; we produce a well-formed sentence. At other times, we use our brains to work out a problem like the answer to a difficult math equation, or to form an opinion on a particular issue. In this review paper, Evans (2003) describes these two distinct forms of reasoning, and argues that they are supported by separate cognitive systems in the brain.

System 1 is sometimes called our implicit reasoning, or unconscious system. It is thought to be the universal cognition that is shared between humans and other animals. Even though the brain goes through many steps using this type of reasoning, we’re usually only aware of the end product (in Evan’s terms, ‘only the final product is posted to consciousness’). System 1 processes are based on associative learning that activates specific neural networks. As a result, System 1 knowledge is based on prior experiences and beliefs. When we experience a flame and the sensation of heat together repeatedly, we begin to associate fire with heat and pull away from fire even without thinking about it. Evan’s argues that the learning mechanisms of this system are domain-general, but that the function is domain-specific.

System 2 is thought to have evolved more recently and to be unique to humans. Its processes are slower, operate in sequence, and are under voluntary control. This system requires the use of working memory (WM) and is therefore restricted to the limitations of WM (e.g., how much you can hold in mind at one time). The purpose of System 2 is for abstract, hypothetical thinking. Consider the example of how I decided to get to campus today: System 1 instinctively reaches for the car keys as this is how I have travelled to campus all winter long; however, System 2 constructs a mental model of possibilities, such as taking into account it is now Spring, the temperature is warmer, and the roads are clear, therefore I could dust of my bicycle and get some exercise while I travel to school, which has health benefits compared to sitting in a car driving. System 2 would also take into consideration the fact that my bicycle will require a tune up in order to use it and I unfortunately do not have enough time to do the work if I am to arrive on time, therefore I should drive to campus today in my car and make some time on the weekend to get my bicycle ready. It is clear from this example that the two processes interact with one another depending on what is being reasoned.

One technique used to investigate these two systems is a deductive reasoning paradigm. The participant judges whether an argument is true or false requiring reasoning using System 2. Sometimes the argument uses familiar information in a believable or unbelievable way. Judgments influenced by this prior knowledge reflect the influence of System 1.  Neuropsychological studies employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides additional evidence for the distinction between System 1 and 2 processes because separate brain areas are activated on tasks tapping System 1 and/or 2.

Of interest to our lab is how these systems might influence language learning.

Blogger: Ian Gallant is about to graduate from the Masters of Clinical Science degree in Speech Language Pathology. He hangs out in the LWM lab on a regular basis. 

Morpheme Learning of Children With Specific Language Impairment Under Controlled Instructional Conditions

Connell, P. & Stone, C. (1992). Morpheme learning of children with specific language impairment under controlled instructional conditions. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, Volume 35, 844-852.

Connell and Stone (1992) examined how children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) learn differently than Typically Developing (TD) children. The study investigated language learning in children with SLI under controlled experimental teaching conditions. According to Connell’s previous work (1986), children with SLI do not differ from children with TD in learning language rules during teaching sessions under an imitation condition that requires imitating and producing language rules. In comparison, children with SLI showed poorer learning of language rules under a modeling condition that required only listening to the input.    

The 1992 study compared the comprehension and production performance of children with SLI, and either age or language - matched groups. Specifically, it examined children’s mastery of learning the new morphemes under modeling and imitation instruction conditions. Using a computerized language- teaching program, children were taught a set of invented morphemes over a two-week period. The results indicated that for morpheme comprehension, there was no difference between children with SLI and the control groups under modeling or imitation conditions. On the other hand, for morpheme production, children with SLI scored significantly lower than the other groups in the modeling, but not the imitation condition. In sum, children with SLI produced the invented new morphemes more reliably under imitation trials than modeling trials. However, TD children showed no such preferences regarding either the molding or imitation instruction.

These results suggest that children with SLI may fail to learn language simply from hearing language models. Rather, children with SLI may benefit from learning in a richer context involving production and comprehension.

Blogger: Areej Balilah

Learning Non-Adjacent Regularities at Age 0;7

Gervain, J., & Werker, J.F. (In press). Learning non-adjacent regularities at age 0;7. Journal of Child Language, DOI:10.1017/S0305000912000256

The ability to learn rules is an important part of language learning. Infants have been found to be able to learn certain regularities involving both adjacent repetitions (e.g., ‘wo fe fe’) and non-adjacent repetitions (e.g., ‘wo fe wo’). This study compared learning of adjacent and non-adjacent repetitions in 7-month old infants to examine evidence that these patterns are processed differently in the brain.

In each of two experiments, infants completed a test phase: the infant heard a ‘word’ that either followed a pattern (e.g., adjacent repetition) or had no pattern (e.g., ‘wo fe  ga’) at the same time they looked to a light. If the infant noticed, or was familiar with, the pattern of the word being played, the infant would look away quickly. If the word being played was novel, the infant would look longer. A ‘looking time difference’ would show that the infant discriminated the pattern from the novel words. In Experiment 1, there was a familiarization phase: the infants heard words that followed the pattern (e.g., adjacent repetition) for 2 minutes prior to the test phase. In Experiment 2, the infant completed the test phase only with no familiarization phase.

Infants showed a ‘looking time difference’ for both adjacent and non-adjacent repetitions in Experiment 1 with the familiarization phase, but not Experiment 2. There were no differences in learning across trials for adjacent or non-adjacent repetitions.  These results indicate that the infants learned the relevant rule during the familiarization phase in Experiment 1. There was no evidence of a different learning mechanism for adjacent vs. non-adjacent repetitions, though more research at other stages of development is needed.

The findings provide further evidence of the importance of pattern learning in language acquisition. Children with language impairment may need more explicit (‘meta’) strategies to notice/learn linguistics patterns/rules.

Blogger: Lisa Archibald

Sentence Repetition as a Measure of Early Grammatical Development in Italian

Devescovi, A., & Caselli, M.C. (2007). Sentence repetition as a measure of early grammatical development in Italian. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 42(2), 187–208. 

Early identification of language impairment is essential in order to provide timely intervention, however, few standardized measures exist for children under four years of age. Devescovi and Caselli suggest that the Sentence Repetition Test (SRT) could serve as a suitable assessment of language development for young children based on the premise that a child’s ability to repeat a sentence is representative of her spontaneous language abilities. Consensus has not been reached on whether the SRT is an accurate measure of language ability; some say it overestimates ability, while others argue it underestimates it. Most significantly though, SRT has been recognized as a tool for identifying language impairment (e.g., Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001).

In the first of two studies, Devescovi and Caselli examine test-retest reliability of SRT in 100 Italian-speaking children aged 2;0 to 4;0. The authors find that calculating the mean length of utterance in words is sensitive to linguistic development between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6, and that number of sentences repeatedly correctly better discriminates the older age bands. It is important to note that MLU is calculated in words in this study by counting not morphemes, but whole words, which is common in studies of the development of Italian. Perhaps calculation of MLU using morphemes would offer better discrimination beyond 2;6.

In the second study, Devescovi and Caselli examine the correlation between SRT performance, verbal memory span (VMS), and spontaneous speech (structured conversation and picture description), noting that verbal memory span has been shown to predict MLU in spontaneous speech (Blake et al., 1994). SRT responses and spontaneous utterances are analyzed for three factors: number of verbs, omitted articles, and MLU (in words). Analysis revealed no correlation between any of these measures and VMS after controlling for age. Article omission and number of verbs in SRT were both related to spontaneous speech, while correlation between MLU (in words) of SRT and spontaneous speech was not significant.

The sentences used in the SRT included simple sentence structure and only those morphemes expected to develop by 4;0. While it is important to include sentences that could be repeated by the youngest children in the age span, it is possible that limiting the complexity of the stimuli may have limited the performance of the older children, causing a ceiling effect. Despite limitations of the task, positive correlations shown in the findings suggest that some form of SRT may be beneficial in assessing language of young children.

Blogger: Laura Pauls

Variability and Detection of Invariant Structure

Variability and Detection of Invariant Structure. Gomez, R. L. (2002). Psychological Science, 13, 5.

Recent theories of language learning suggest that language learners are particularly adept at tracking the statistical regularities that exist within natural language. For example, learners are able to sensitive to “adjacent dependencies”, that is, the higher probabilities that occur between adjacent syllables within words than between words. However, a key aspect of language learning involves learning patterns between “non-adjacent dependencies”. Some examples of nonadjacent dependencies experienced in everyday language use are the dependencies between auxiliaries and inflectional morphemes (e.g.: is running), and dependencies involving agreement (e.g.: the kids in the park are playing). What is of interest to researchers is how humans learn to track these nonadjacent relationships.

In an experimental task involving learning nonadjacent dependencies, subjects listen to a string of syllables and must learn that a particular non-adjacent pattern – for example, that a first element always occurs with a third element in the string. A key hypothesis in this learning regards the middle element. If the middle element varies more, the pattern between the first and third element becomes more salient and the learner shows greats sensitivity to learning the nonadjacent dependency.

In this study, adults and infants were exposed to an artificial language containing nonadjacent dependencies between words (e.g.: aXd, bXe, cXf). The set size of X varied between conditions, drawing X from a set size of either 2, 6, 12, or 24 elements. Learning was greater for when the set size from which X was drawn was highly variable (set size = 24). These results demonstrate that learning is adaptable may be dynamically guided by the statistical structure in their linguistic environment. It should be noted that these results have not been replicated in all subsequent studies.

Statistical learning in children with language impairment has been investigated only recently (see blogpost from Evans et al., 2009). It may be that these children have more difficulty recognizing such patterns in language. Current interventions involving explicitly teaching linguistic rules may facilitate this learning.

Blogger: Nicolette Noonan

Relationships Among Linguistic Processing Speed, Phonological Working Memory, and Attention in Children Who Stutter

Anderson, J. D., & Wagovich, S. A. (2010). Relationships among linguistic processing speed, phonological working memory, and attention in children who stutter. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 35, 216-234. 

Studies of speech reaction time (SRT) are thought to examine the efficiency with which a person processes and responds to language-based stimuli. The few studies that have examined SRT in groups of children who stutter (CWS) and their typically developing peers have revealed mixed findings.

One finding is that longer SRT’s correspond with higher receptive vocabulary scores in children who do not stutter, but that for CWS, there appears to be no relationship between vocabulary and SRT. It is proposed that the relationship between vocabulary scores and SRT’s in typically fluent groups is mediated by lexical competition, such that individuals with larger vocabularies take longer to select a word and thus have slower reaction times than children with poorer vocabularies. Anderson and Wagovich hypothesized that factors related to lexical processing, such as phonological working memory, may correlate with SRT’s in children who stutter.  These researchers also investigated whether attentional processes may affect SRT’s in CWS.

In this study, groups of children who do or do not stutter completed nonword repetition, picture naming, and their parents completed a temperament questionnaire about them. These measures were used to evaluate phonological working memory, SRT, and attention, respectively. Results revealed that performance on tests of nonword repletion related to SRT in the children who stuttered but not the typically fluent group. Anderson and Wagovich concluded that for CWS, phonological working memory is associated with SRT.

Nonword repetition is typically considered to be a measure of phonological short-term memory because it involves immediate repetition only, rather than additionally requiring information processing as in working memory tasks. More broadly, nonword repetition taps several processes involved in phonological processing (discrimination, encoding, storage, output). Further work is needed to understand what underlying process may account for the associations between nonword repetition and SRT in the CWS in this study.

Blogger: Alexandra Smith

Grammatical Difficulties in Children with SLI: Is Learning Deficient?

Grammatical Difficulties in Children with SLI: Is Learning Deficient? Hsu, H. J., & Bishop, D. (2011). Hum Dev. 53(5): 264-277.

One view of language learning suggests that children (and humans generally) are sensitive to the patterns of sounds that they hear in language. This statistical learning is based on the frequencies or probabilities of sounds in the language. First, young children store heard sentences in an exemplar-by-exemplar fashion (Ellis, 2002), memorizing individual items. In time, children develop more  abstract (syntactic) patterns of different types, and these frames allow them to produce correct grammatical sentences (Ellis, 2002).

Hsu and Bishop discuss the viewpoint that the grammatical deficits in SLI are due to an impairment in the ability to extract these statistical patterns from the input. As a result, children with SLI may require more exposure to learn abstract syntactic patterns. Indeed, Bishop, Adams, and Rosen (2006) found that even after daily training with a particular construction type, children with SLI did not achieve fluent automatic comprehension. It may be that the poor statistical learning in SLI results from other deficits, however. Limitations in short-term memory (Coady & Evans, 2008) or speech perception (Joanisse et al., 2000) may negatively impact statistical learning abilities in SLI.

Children with SLI may have difficulty identifying patterns in the language they hear. Isolating particular patterns to increase the frequency of exposure and highlight the form are approaches that would be consistent with this viewpoint.

Blogger: Areej Balilah.