Spelling Errors in French Elementary School Students: A Linguistic Analysis.

Purpose: This study offers the first description of misspellings across elementary school using the Phonological, Orthographic and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS), a linguistic framework based on Triple Word Form theory, adapted for French (POMAS-FR). It aims to test the "universality" of POMAS and its suitability to track development in French spelling.

Method: One hundred ninety-four typically developing French children (Grades 1-5) produced a written narrative and words-to-dictation.

Executive Function Training for Deaf Children: Impact of a Music Intervention.

Several studies have reported poor executive function (EF) development in deaf children with subsequent impacts on their social and academic attainment. This paper describes the results of a music-based EF intervention designed for deaf children and carried out in two sets of primary schools. This is the first classroom-based EF training study with deaf children, and it also incorporates a replication phase.

Implicit learning of non-verbal regularities by deaf children with cochlear implants: An investigation with a dynamic temporal prediction task.

Some deaf children continue to show difficulties in spoken language learning after cochlear implantation. Part of this variability has been attributed to poor implicit learning skills. However, the involvement of other processes (e.

The Spelling Errors of French and English Children With Developmental Language Disorder at the End of Primary School.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often struggle learning to spell. However, it is still unclear where their spelling difficulties lie, and whether they reflect on-going difficulties with specific linguistic domains. It is also unclear whether the spelling profiles of these children vary in different orthographies.

Semantic fluency difficulties in developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD): poor semantic structure of the lexicon or slower retrieval processes?

Background: Children with dyslexia and/or developmental language disorder (hereafter children with DDLD) have been reported to retrieve fewer words than their typically developing (TD) peers in semantic fluency tasks. It is not known whether this retrieval difficulty can be attributed to the semantic structure of their lexicon being poor or, alternatively, to words being retrieved more slowly despite semantic structure being intact.

Aims: To test two theoretical models that could potentially account for retrieval difficulties in semantic fluency tasks, namely, the Poor Lexical-Semantic Structure Model and the Slow-Retrieval Model.

Deficient Explicit Access to Phonological Representations Explains Phonological Fluency Difficulties in Greek Children With Dyslexia and/or Developmental Language Disorder.

It is well-established that children with dyslexia and/or Developmental Language Disorder (hereafter children with DDLD) perform poorly on phonological tasks compared to typically developing (TD) children. However, there has been some debate as to whether their phonological deficit arises directly from an impairment in phonological representations, or instead from deficient access to (intact) phonological representations. This study tested the Degraded Phonological Representations Hypothesis and the Deficient Phonological Access Hypothesis using a task that is not often used with children with DDLD, namely phonological fluency.

Using the Hands to Represent Objects in Space: Gesture as a Substrate for Signed Language Acquisition.

An ongoing issue of interest in second language research concerns what transfers from a speaker's first language to their second. For learners of a sign language, gesture is a potential substrate for transfer. Our study provides a novel test of gestural production by eliciting silent gesture from novices in a controlled environment.

Teachers' reported practices for teaching writing in England.

To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers' approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the 'simple view of writing' as a framework to examine the extent to which different aspects of the writing process are addressed. One hundred and eighty-eight staff from ten different schools responded to an online questionnaire.

Measurement Issues: Assessing language skills in young children.

Background: Language and communication skills are central to children's ability to engage in social relationships and access learning experiences. This paper identifies issues which practitioners and researchers should consider when assessing language skills. A range of current language assessments is reviewed.

Sign-Supported English: is it effective at teaching vocabulary to young children with English as an Additional Language?

Background: Children who are learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) may start school with smaller vocabularies than their monolingual peers. Given the links between vocabulary and academic achievement, it is important to evaluate interventions that are designed to support vocabulary learning in this group of children.

Aims: To evaluate an intervention, namely Sign-Supported English (SSE), which uses conventionalized manual gestures alongside spoken words to support the learning of English vocabulary by children with EAL.

From gesture to sign language: conventionalization of classifier constructions by adult hearing learners of British Sign Language.

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use gestures that bear some similarities to classifiers.

Word production errors in children with developmental language impairments.

This review focuses on the errors that children with developmental language impairments make on three types of word production tasks: lexical retrieval, the elicitation of derivationally complex forms and the repetition of non-sense forms. The studies discussed in this review come principally from children with specific language impairment, and from children who are English-speakers or deaf users of British sign language. It is argued that models of word production need to be able to account for the data presented here, and need to have explanatory power across both modalities (i.

Phonological deficits in specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia: towards a multidimensional model.

An on-going debate surrounds the relationship between specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia, in particular with respect to their phonological abilities. Are these distinct disorders? To what extent do they overlap? Which cognitive and linguistic profiles correspond to specific language impairment, dyslexia and comorbid cases? At least three different models have been proposed: the severity model, the additional deficit model and the component model. We address this issue by comparing children with specific language impairment only, those with dyslexia-only, those with specific language impairment and dyslexia and those with no impairment, using a broad test battery of language skills.

Sentence repetition as a measure of morphosyntax in monolingual and bilingual children.

Bilingual children are frequently misdiagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Misdiagnosis may be minimized by tests with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The current study used a new test, the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-English 32 (SASIT-E32), to investigate sentence repetition in monolingual and bilingual children, and specifically to compare overall repetition accuracy and error patterns in the two groups.

Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: evidence from a semantic fluency task.

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same 'cognitive signatures' that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in school-aged children with specific language impairment.

Background: Parents play a critical role in their child's language development. Therefore, advising parents of a child with language difficulties on how to facilitate their child's language might benefit the child. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) has been developed specifically for this purpose.

Do children with dyslexia and/or specific language impairment compensate for place assimilation? Insight into phonological grammar and representations.

English speakers have to recognize, for example, that te[m] in te[m] pens is a form of ten, despite place assimilation of the nasal consonant. Children with dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) are commonly proposed to have a phonological deficit, and we investigate whether that deficit extends to place assimilation, as a way of probing phonological representations and phonological grammar. Children with SLI plus dyslexia, SLI only, and dyslexia only listened to sentences containing a target word in different assimilatory contexts-viable, unviable, and no change-and pressed a button to report hearing the target.

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

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).

Assessing component language deficits in the early detection of reading difficulty risk.

This article focuses on some of the linguistic components that underlie letter-sound decoding skills and reading comprehension: specifically phonology, morphology, and syntax. Many children who have reading difficulties had language deficits that were detectable before they began reading. Early identification of language difficulties will therefore help identify children at risk of reading failure.

Neural correlates of sublexical processing in phonological working memory.

This study investigated links between working memory and speech processing systems. We used delayed pseudoword repetition in fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of sublexical structure in phonological working memory (pWM). We orthogonally varied the number of syllables and consonant clusters in auditory pseudowords and measured the neural responses to these manipulations under conditions of covert rehearsal (Experiment 1).

Identifying specific language impairment in deaf children acquiring British Sign Language: implications for theory and practice.

This paper presents the first ever group study of specific language impairment (SLI) in users of sign language. A group of 50 children were referred to the study by teachers and speech and language therapists. Individuals who fitted pre-determined criteria for SLI were then systematically assessed.

Developmental disorders of language and literacy: special issue.

Language and literacy are cognitive skills of exceptional complexity. It is therefore not surprising that they are at risk of impairment either during development or as a result of damage (e.g.

A challenge to current models of past tense inflection: the impact of phonotactics.

Is past tense production better modelled by a Single Mechanism or a Words and Rules model? We present data concerning a phenomenon that has not been considered by either model-regular past tense verbs with contrasting phonotactics. One set of verbs contains clusters at the inflected verb end that also occur in monomorphemic words ('monomorphemically legal clusters', MLC) whereas the other has clusters that can only occur in inflected forms ('monomorphemically illegal clusters', MIC). We argue that if children apply a morphological rule, phonotactics will not affect performance.