Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

Language Ability, Executive Functioning, And Behaviour In School-Age Children, Courtney Karasinski

Courtney Karasinski

Background: Many children with language impairment present with deficits in other areas, including executive functioning (EF), attention and behaviour. Similarly, many children receiving services for attention or behaviour problems have deficits in language ability. Aims: To evaluate the relations among EF, language ability and behaviour problems in a sample of school-age children with a wide range of language and behaviour profiles. The following research questions were addressed: Does performance on EF tasks predict language ability? Do language ability and EF predict problems with attention, internalizing and/or externalizing? Methods & Procedures: EF was defined as referring to the separable, yet related, …

Behavior Problems And Social Functioning In Adolescents With Language Impairment, Courtney Karasinski

Courtney Karasinski

Adolescents with language impairment (LI) often are underidentified and may be perceived as lazy or noncompliant, rather than as individuals with LI. In this article, the author discusses two possible reasons for this underdiagnosis of LI in adolescents. First, many adolescents with LI present with comorbid behavior problems, which may be the primary concern of parents and school officials. Second, some adolescents with LI perform within age expectations on basic linguistic skills, but difficulties are apparent in higher-level linguistic tasks, including oral and written narrative comprehension and production. Given that adolescents with LI may present with comorbid behavior and academic …

Lexical And Grammatical Skills In Toddlers On The Autism Spectrum Compared To Late Talking Toddlers, Susan Ellis Weismer, Morton Gernsbacher, Sheri Stronach, Courtney Karasinski, Elizabeth Eernisse, Courtney Venker

Courtney Karasinski

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25- month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early lexical–grammatical relationships. Findings revealed that semantic categories of words— including psychological state terms—used by toddlers on the autism spectrum were very similar to those of late talkers. Both groups were equivalent with respect to grammatical complexity and proportion of toddlers combining words, though late talkers displayed a relatively stronger association between lexical–grammatical abilities. These tentative …

Grammatical Morphology In School-Age Children With And Without Language Impairment: A Discriminant Function Analysis, Maura Jones Moyle, Courtney Karasinski, Susan Ellis Weismer, Brenda Gorman

Courtney Karasinski

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test Bedore and Leonard’s (1998) proposal that a verb morpheme composite may hold promise as a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in English speakers and serve as an accurate basis for the classification of children with and without SLI beyond the preschool level.

Method: The language transcripts of 50 school-age children with SLI (Mage = 7;9 [years;months]) and 50 age-matched typically developing peers (Mage = 7;9) were analyzed. Following the Bedore and Leonard (1998) procedure, 3 variables were measured: a finite verb morpheme composite, a noun morpheme composite, and mean …

Comprehension Of Inferences In Discourse Processing By Adolescents With And Without Language Impairment, Courtney Karasinski, Susan Ellis Weismer

Courtney Karasinski

Purpose: This study investigated inference construction within spoken narratives in adolescents with varying cognitive and language abilities, using W. Kintsch’s (1988) construction-integration model as a framework. The role of working memory in inference construction was examined along with language and nonverbal cognition.

Method: Participants were 527 eighth-grade students in 4 diagnostic groups: normal language (NL), low cognitive (LC), specific language impairment (SLI), and nonspecific language impariment (NLI). Participants answered premise and inference questions based on adjacent and distant information.

Results: Distant inferences were significantly more difficult than were adjacent inferences. When controlling for premise accuracy, the NL group performed significantly …