Specific Language Impairment

(RADLD (Director). (2012, September 20). Literacy difficulties and SLI (DLD) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjF6rx-6KRY)

Overview

  • A group of individuals with deficits in the acquisition of language skills
    • Have a standard IQ
    • No other neurological impairments
    • Impacts a person’s ability to speak, listen, read, and/or write

Prevalence

  • 7-8% of school-aged children, continues into adulthood
    • Only 1% of the general population
    • More boys are diagnosed than girls, 1.33 boys diagnosed per 1 girl diagnose
    • Can occur along with other developmental disorders
    • Having SLI is a risk factor for having a learning disability

Causes

  • No known causes have been identified
    • Possible genetic component
    • Learning more than one language does not cause SLI
    • Diagnosed through observation, interviews, questionnaire, general learning assessment, and a standardized test on the child’s language abilities

kidsplaying

Communication Skills and Disorders

Content

  • Children with SLI have smaller vocabularies than their peers
    • Children with SLI have difficulties perceiving sounds in rapid speech streams
      • Explains why they are not able to identify new words to learn
    • They have short term memories for stimuli
      • This causes them not to remember new words that they have heard

Form

  • Children with SLI have worse phonemic awareness compared to their peers
    • Have difficulties distinguishing between similar sounds
    • Difficulties analyzing the structure of words
  • Children with SLI struggle with their grammar
    • Their syntax and sentence structure has deficits
    • Produce ungrammatical sentences
    • Difficulties understanding sentence with complex structure

Use 

  • Children with SLI develop language at a later rate than their peers
    • They start speaking later than their peers
    • Produce their first words a year later, second birthday

boys-286245_1920

Literacy Skills and Disorders

  • Reading Skills
    • Individuals with SLI tend to have issues regarding specific tasks related to reading and literacy, for example, finding rhyming words or alliterative words.
    • Errors in reading individual words are more prevalent as individuals with SLI, typically, have lower phonemic awareness.
    • Poor reading comprehension skills are more common in individuals with SLI.
  • Writing Skills
    • Individuals diagnosed with SLI tend to use fewer words in their writing as well as have a lower diversity of words.
    • For structural aspects of writing, including skills such as organization, these skills in most cases are impaired.
    • Grammar is an area that individuals with SLI usually struggle with, especially when focusing on verb tenses being accurate.
    • The ideas used within the writing of individuals with SLI typically have a poorer quality.
    • While comparing individuals with SLI to their typically developing peers, they will usually demonstrate a deficiency in their writing skills, 

boy-921807_1920

Verbal Interventions

  • Auditory Stimulation Training
    • Used to improve the auditory processing in individuals with SLI
    • The software which challenges a person’s linguistic and cognitive abilities 
    • Consists of different tasks which manipulate speech style, language components, and stimuli
    • Fast ForWord is a commonly used intervention software
  • Repetition
    • A study done by Horst in 2017
    • Tested three-year-old children with and without SLI 
    • Parents read children’s book repeatedly to their children
    • Results found that children with SLI did worse remembering words initially but performed the same remembering the words a week later

childrens-books-570121_1920

Written Communication Interventions

  • Domain-Specific Approaches
    • A structure of interventions that can focus on individual areas of language development deficiencies
    • Follows either a top-down or bottom-up approach, which is either focusing on general details with working up to bigger and bigger components of speech or the other way around
    • When using this structural form, it is important to use the individual’s language strengths as the base for determining the sequential order
    • Allows for co-dependencies of language, which is understanding how to process information based on making associations and representations throughout language
  • Probe-Based Exercises
    • Introducing situations that encourage the individual to use the targeted area of language (i.e. promoting the use of the “-ed” suffix)
    • These exercises usually involve toys or props of some sort.
    • Promotes the use of different morphemes within language, which can be applied to increasing grammatical and literacy skills
  • Storytelling
    • Can be approached from multiple angles including in a group setting, in a more one-on-one setting, retelling a story, or coming up with a personal story narrative
    • Allows individuals to increase their narrative abilities, or their ability to tell a story in a clear and organized fashion.
    • Allows for a better understanding of components like reading text, sentence comprehension, as well as other semantic processes

Classroom Video

https://youtu.be/fPrz2leuM2Q

https://youtu.be/IbsMeY9-KG0

https://youtu.be/Q9e5kdZDO00

References

Acosta Rodríguez, R. (2016). Intervention in reading processes in pupils with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Psicothema, 28(1), 40–46. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2015.144

ASHA. (2020). Speech-Language Pathologists. 

Encyclopedia of Children’s Health. (2020). Specific language impairment.

Hessling, A., & Schuele, C. M. (2020). Individualized Narrative Intervention for School-Age Children With Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech, & Hearing Services in Schools, 51(3), 687+. 

Icommunicate therapy. (2019, August 25). Specific language impairment (SLI). 

Joanisse, M., & Seidenberg, M. (1998, September 08). Specific language impairment: A deficit in grammar or processing? 

Justice, K.L.P.T.L. M. (2016). Language development from theory to practice. [Yuzu]. 

Leonard, L. B. (2014). Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT press

Leonard, L. B. (2017). Children with specific language impairment (Second ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Leonard, L. B., Camarata, S. M., Pawlowska, M., Brown, B., & Camarata, M. N. (2008). The acquisition of tense and agreement morphemes by children with specific language impairment during intervention: phase 3. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51(1), 120+. 

Nation, K., Clarke, P., Marshall, C. M., & Durand, M. (2004). Hidden language impairments in children: parallels between poor reading comprehension and specific language impairment? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(1), 199+. 

NICDC. (2019, July). Specific Language Impairment. 

Norris, J. A., & Hoffman, P. R. (1990). Language intervention within naturalistic environments. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 21(2), 72-84. doi:10.1044/0161-1461.2102.72

RADLD (Director). (2012, September 20). Literacy difficulties and SLI (DLD) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjF6rx-6KRY

Roden, I., Früchtenicht, K., Kreutz, G., Linderkamp, F., & Grube, D. (2019). Auditory stimulation training with technically manipulated musical material in preschool children with specific language impairments: An explorative study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02026

Rohlfing, K. J., Ceurremans, J., & Horst, J. S. (2017). Benefits of repeated book readings in children with sli. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 39(2), 367-370. doi:10.1177/1525740117692480

Sedivy, J. (2020). Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics (Second ed.). New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sinauer Associates.

Strong, G. K., Torgerson, C. J., Torgerson, D., & Hulme, C. (2010). A systematic meta‐analytic review of evidence for the effectiveness of the ‘Fast ForWord’ language intervention program. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52(3), 224-235. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02329.x

Stavrakaki, S. (2015). Specific Language Impairment : Current Trends in Research. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Tambyraja, S. R., Schmitt, M. B., Farquharson, K., & Justice, L. M. (2015). Stability of language and literacy profiles of children with language impairment in the public schools. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58(4), 1167+. 

Tomblin, J. B., Records, N. L., Buckwalter, P., Zhang, X., Smith, E., & O’Brien, M. (1997). Prevalence of specific language impairment in kindergarten children. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 40(6), 1245–1260. 

Vandewalle, E., Boets, B., Ghesquiere, P., & Zink, I. (2012). Development of phonological processing skills in children with specific language impairment with and without literacy delay: a 3-year longitudinal study. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55(4), 1053+. 

Williams, G. J., Larkin, R. F., & Blaggan, S. (2013). Written language skills in children with specific language impairment. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 48(2), 160–171.