Pragmatic Language in Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Posted on Oct 1, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Pragmatics in Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Context of the Role of Language

Linguistic, Paralinguistic, and Extralinguistic Aspects

Linguistic

Discourse refers to a series of phrases spoken in a conversation or displayed in a narrative. Discourse can be divided into macro and microstructural levels.

  • Social Organization of Discourse: Taking turns (macrostructure of talks), home response.
  • Topical Management (linguistic context): Home, maintenance, change, close.
  • Corrections (metapragmatic ability): Recognition of breaks, repair of breaks.
Paralinguistic
  • Prosody
  • Proxemics
  • Facial expressions
  • Gestures
Extralinguistic

Situation: The context of the conversation.

Participants: Refers to those involved in the conversational act.

  • A) The handling of prior information on the topic of conversation.
  • B) The role of each participant.

Alterations of Pragmatics

  • Decrease in quality/quantity in the range of communicative intentions.
  • Using unconventional forms with little information.
  • Creep.
  • Lack of perspective-taking.
  • Difficulties in the introduction/change/end of topic.
  • Difficulties in making shifts (slightly responsive/over-initiator).
  • Failure to repair/recognition of breaks.
  • Altered prosody/altered proxemic patterns.
  • Difficulties with turn-taking.
  • Difficulties with gestures and facial expressions (excessive/poor/inadequate).
  • Poor/absent eye contact.

Pragmatic Alterations in SLI

  1. Early studies suggest that alterations at this level are explained as a result of formal language disorders.
  2. Subsequent studies demonstrate some pragmatic problems that seem to increase as the demands of understanding and linguistic processing increase.
  3. Some children with SLI appear to have difficulties capturing inconsistent emotional messages.
  4. They have no clinically significant evidence of problems in social interaction.
  5. In conversation, it is concluded that children with SLI with low comprehension levels are more affected. Children with mixed SLI differ from children with expressive SLI: they interrupt less, use the adult partner less, use more connective junctions, a smaller lexicon, pronouns, and conjunctions.

Morphosyntactic Level

Morphology and syntax are two dimensions that represent the rules governing language and, along with phonology, constitute the form of language.

Morphosyntactic Developmental Patterns

  • Pre-first language
  • Syntactic development
  • Latest acquisitions
Pre-language Stage
  • 0-6 months: Nonlinguistic vocalizations, biologically conditioned. Little influence of language on the productive aspects.
  • 6-9 months: Vocalizations begin to have a communicative meaning given by intonation, prosody, rhythm, etc.
  • 9-10 months: Pre-conversation: the child vocalizes more during the intervals left by the adult.
  • 10-12 months: Includes some familiar words. Vocals are more accurate and controlled in tone and intensity. Combines sounds and syllables repeated at will.
Precursors of Language: Use, Content, Form, Pragmatics
Pragmatic Precursors
  1. Eye contact
  2. Social smile
  3. Mutual gaze patterns
  4. Proto-conversations
  5. Communicative interactions
Content Precursors
  1. Attention to different visual and auditory objects, object permanence
  2. Perception and attention to their own body
  3. Relationship between objects, beginning of symbolism
Form Precursors
  1. Attention to oral language and environmental sounds
  2. Location of sound stimuli
  3. Identifying different sounds, imitating sounds
  4. Reaction to intonation patterns and adult language (prosody)
  5. Involuntary vocalizations
  6. Intentional vocalizations
  7. Long and varied vocalizations
  8. Jargon and imitation of syllables and words

First Syntactic Development

  • 12-18 months: First words emerge, with features of semantic extension.
  • 18-24 months: First two-element statements appear, use of inflections, use of negative sentences through “no”.
  • 24-30 months: Telegraphic speech period. Key words and function words are displayed. Expression of nouns and verbs. E.g., “breast eat bread”.

Grammatical Expansion

  • 30-36 months: More complex sentence structure, reaching 4-element combined structures. First coordinated phrases appear. First articles, adverbs, use of gender and number appear.
  • 36-42 months: Complex sentences with more than one clause, frequent use of “and”. Subordinate clauses appear with “but, and, because” and using “what”. Interrogative markers and auxiliary verbs appear (“be” and “have”). Future periphrasis (e.g., “I will…”). Children have learned the essential resources of their language, still making mistakes in relation to adults.
  • 42-54 months: Grammatical structures are complemented by the pronominal system. Phase of syntactic and morphological errors. Passive structures appear, along with “after, then, too…”. Correct use of main tenses (present, past, future). Different modes of speech (claim, denial, interrogation). Increased use of prepositions.
  • 54 months: More complex sentence structures (passive, conditional, circumstantial time). Use of passive and verbal connections. Towards 6 years, use of language play (jokes, riddles).

Some Acquisitions After Six Years (Crystal)

  • Increased production of possessive pronouns.
  • Misuse of adverbs and prepositions of time and space.
  • Proper use of verb tenses.
  • Consistent change in the usual order of sentence elements for emphasis.

Prominent Features of Acquisition

  • Articles: Early onset, indeterminate forms used at the beginning. After 3 years, used properly according to gender and number markings.
  • Pronouns: Mastering this category is a long process determined by morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. First pronouns are “me” and “you”, and around 3 years, third-person pronouns. Redundancy is present during this process (e.g., “my self”).
  • Prepositions: At age 4, prepositions “a, with, in, to” are consolidated. Prepositions “between, even, without” are used. Prepositions “to, from” do not appear.
  • Conjunctions: Conjunctions are little used by children. Coordinates are “and, that, but”. Subordinating conjunctions include “that, lest, because, well, and, yes”.
  • Verbs: First verb forms used are present indicative and imperative. Past tenses appear later (4 to 5 years), and future tense last (in paraphrase, not before 7 years). Common errors include regularization of irregular forms.
  • Gender and Number Markers: Early markers appear from two years, but with errors. Most frequent errors are with non-quantifiable nouns (sand, water) or concordance errors. Gender errors are more frequent than number errors.

Mechanisms for the Acquisition of Morphosyntax in Children

Morphological and syntactic errors represent the core of SLI. It is necessary to consider how both aspects are acquired in children.

  1. Inside-out theories: Highlight the modular nature of language acquisition from innate mechanisms. Acquisition is a discovery rather than a construction or appropriation of symbolic tools.
  2. Outside-in theories: Advocate an active role for the child in language acquisition (cognitive role) and a supporting role for the language environment (theories based on social interaction). Language is a tool that begins with interaction with the environment.

Lexicon Problems in SLI

Words are represented in a mental lexicon for recognition, storage, and retrieval. These representations are varied: phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and associated terms. It is essential to understand how our minds store and organize words, especially when working with a child with language comprehension problems.

Lexical Organization of the Mental Lexicon

Two phenomena exemplify the disconnect between signifier and signified:

  1. Hearing words before the speaker finishes uttering them.
  2. Having a word “on the tip of the tongue.”

Mental Representations of Lexical Items

  1. Phonological representation: Specifies the sounds that make up a word, their order, stress pattern, and syllabic structure.
  2. Orthographic representation: How the word is recognized in writing (graphemes).
  3. Morphological representation: Consists of sublexical units (“des-ero”) and specifies how the word can be transformed grammatically: love – lovely.
  4. Syntactic representation: Specifies the word’s grammatical category.
  5. Semantic representation: Refers to a set of semantic features.
  6. List of related terms: Explicitly related to the word’s meaning, this list is extensive and varies by individual.

Organization of the Mental Lexicon: Decoding Process Steps

  1. A person hears a word and performs a phonological analysis to identify its segments.
  2. The phonological analysis is matched with representations stored in the mental lexicon.
  3. Once recognized, the morphological representation and meaning become available. These representations are called entries.
  4. Output representations consist of the phonological, semantic, and syntactic representations that determine the word’s placement in a sentence.

List of Related Terms

When a lexical representation is formed, related words are activated.

The greater the number of connected words, the better the verbal comprehension of spoken or written text.

This list of related terms connects to world knowledge stored in long-term memory.

Lexical Disorders in SLI

  • Absence of naming
  • Slow learning of new words
  • Naming errors
  • Semantic association errors and/or restricted associations
Absence of Naming

Severe difficulty in producing the correct word for an object, situation, or person. Clinically, there is no spontaneous or repeated emission of words.

Slow Learning of New Words

Children with SLI may show an absence of the “word explosion” or a chronological delay. However, they maintain a slow pace in learning new words.

Naming Errors

Errors in word identification and production. Construction errors in phonological representation and semantic errors.

Semantic Association Errors and/or Restricted Associations

Difficulty establishing relationships between words within semantic categories.

Word Learning Disorder

Lexical difficulties in children with SLI may be due to:

  1. Deficits in conceptual development.
  2. Phonological difficulties extracting recurrent and stable speech patterns.
  3. Problems coupling each item with a phonological form.

Symptoms of Alterations

  1. Children with SLI perform worse on nonverbal cognitive tasks like symbolic play.
  2. Children with SLI have more problems with unfamiliar tasks and forming new or complex sentences.
  3. Children with SLI have more problems with mathematical tasks and understanding written language.

Conclusion

  • The failure of nonverbal cognitive tasks in children with SLI is attributed to linguistic deficits, not conceptual development problems.
  • Lower verbal IQ scores are explained by the linguistic deficit.
  • Children with SLI use words and sentences to talk about the world; the problem is that they learn slower.

Therefore, the ability to use abstract symbols to represent concepts appears intact in children with SLI.

Explanations for vocabulary development disorders in children with SLI may be related to:

  1. Inability to extract recurrent and stable phonological patterns from speech.
  2. Difficulties connecting phonological forms with concepts.