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

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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

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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, 

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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

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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

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.