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      Who did Buzz see someone? Grammaticality judgement of wh-questions in typically developing children and children with Grammatical-SLI

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          Abstract

          This 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.

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          A functional genetic link between distinct developmental language disorders.

          Rare mutations affecting the FOXP2 transcription factor cause a monogenic speech and language disorder. We hypothesized that neural pathways downstream of FOXP2 influence more common phenotypes, such as specific language impairment. We performed genomic screening for regions bound by FOXP2 using chromatin immunoprecipitation, which led us to focus on one particular gene that was a strong candidate for involvement in language impairments. We then tested for associations between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in this gene and language deficits in a well-characterized set of 184 families affected with specific language impairment. We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human cortex. On analyzing CNTNAP2 polymorphisms in children with typical specific language impairment, we detected significant quantitative associations with nonsense-word repetition, a heritable behavioral marker of this disorder (peak association, P=5.0x10(-5) at SNP rs17236239). Intriguingly, this region coincides with one associated with language delays in children with autism. The FOXP2-CNTNAP2 pathway provides a mechanistic link between clinically distinct syndromes involving disrupted language. 2008 Massachusetts Medical Society
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            Developmental language disorders--a follow-up in later adult life. Cognitive, language and psychosocial outcomes.

            Little is known on the adult outcome and longitudinal trajectory of childhood developmental language disorders (DLD) and on the prognostic predictors. Seventeen men with a severe receptive DLD in childhood, reassessed in middle childhood and early adult life, were studied again in their mid-thirties with tests of intelligence (IQ), language, literacy, theory of mind and memory together with assessments of psychosocial outcome. They were compared with the non language disordered siblings of the DLD cohort to control for shared family background, adults matched to the DLD cohort on age and performance IQ (IQM group) and a cohort from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) matched to the DLD cohort on childhood IQ and social class. The DLD men had normal intelligence with higher performance IQ than verbal IQ, a severe and persisting language disorder, severe literacy impairments and significant deficits in theory of mind and phonological processing. Within the DLD cohort higher childhood intelligence and language were associated with superior cognitive and language ability at final adult outcome. In their mid-thirties, the DLD cohort had significantly worse social adaptation (with prolonged unemployment and a paucity of close friendships and love relationships) compared with both their siblings and NCDS controls. Self-reports showed a higher rate of schizotypal features but not affective disorder. Four DLD adults had serious mental health problems (two had developed schizophrenia). A receptive developmental language disorder involves significant deficits in theory of mind, verbal short-term memory and phonological processing, together with substantial social adaptation difficulties and increased risk of psychiatric disorder in adult life. The theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
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              Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children.

              A critical clinical issue is the identification of a clinical marker, a linguistic form or principle that can be shown to be characteristic of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In this paper we evaluate, as candidate clinical markers, a set of morphemes that mark Tense. In English, this includes -s third person singular, -ed regular past, BE, and DO. According to the Extended Optional Infinitive Account (EOI) of Rice, Wexler, and Cleave (1995), this set of morphemes is likely to appear optionally in the grammars of children with SLI at a rate lower than the optionality evident in younger controls. Three groups of preschool children participated: 37 children with SLI, and two control groups, one of 40 MLU-equivalent children and another of 45 age-equivalent children. Three kinds of evidence support the conclusion that a set of morphemes that marks Tense can be considered a clinical marker: (a) low levels of accuracy for the target morphemes for the SLI group relative to either of the two control groups; (b) affectedness for the set of morphemes defined by the linguistic function of Tense, but not for morphemes unrelated to Tense; and (c) a bimodal distribution for Tense-marking morphemes relative to age peers, in which the typical children are at essentially adult levels of the grammar, whereas children in the SLI group were at low (i.e., non-adultlike) levels of performance. The clinical symptoms are evident in omissions of surface forms. Errors of subject-verb agreement and syntactic misuses are rare, showing that, as predicted, children in an EOI stage who are likely to mark Tense optionally at the same time know a great deal about the grammatical properties of finiteness and agreement in the adult grammar. The findings are discussed in terms of alternative accounts of the grammatical limitations of children with SLI and implications for clinical identification.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Lingua
                Lingua
                Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics. Revue Internationale De Linguistique Generale
                North Holland Publishing
                0024-3841
                February 2011
                February 2011
                : 121
                : 3
                : 408-422
                Affiliations
                Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, DLDCN.org, London, United Kingdom
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States. Tel.: +44 020 7490 7042. h.vanderlely@ 123456dldcn.org
                [1]

                Current address: Department of Language and Communication Science, City University London, United Kingdom.

                Article
                LINGUA1747
                10.1016/j.lingua.2010.10.007
                3030106
                21318176
                2782ec13-db7d-4a50-997f-2f44820a1bdf
                © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

                This document may be redistributed and reused, subject to certain conditions.

                History
                : 31 May 2007
                : 22 September 2010
                : 27 September 2010
                Categories
                Article

                General linguistics
                language acquisition,g-sli,grammaticality judgement,wh-questions
                General linguistics
                language acquisition, g-sli, grammaticality judgement, wh-questions

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