USING PRESCHOOL MATERIALS TO MODIFY THE LANGUAGE OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN1

Although language remediation programs have generally been conducted with the use of special materials in structured group settings, traditional preschool practice emphasizes “incidental teaching” incorporated into children's free play. To determine if incidental teaching practices could be effective in improving children's speech, this study investigated the spontaneous speech of 12 disadvantaged children during free-play periods over eight months of a preschool program. Whenever the children selected a preschool play material, they were prompted and required to ask for it, first by name (noun), then by name plus a word that described the material (adjective-noun combination), then by use of a color adjective-noun combination, and finally by requesting the material and describing how they were going to use it (compound sentence). As each requirement was made, the children's general use of that aspect of language markedly increased, but little change was noted in the amount or nature of the children's interactions with teachers or their use of a set of materials to which they had free access. This study demonstrates that preschool free-play periods can be powerful “incidental teaching” periods by capitalizing on moments when children seek new play materials.     

IN VIVO LANGUAGE INTERVENTION: UNANTICIPATED GENERAL EFFECTS

After observing the lack of generalization of language trained in highly structured training sessions using established behavior modification techniques, “incidental teaching” procedures were developed to change the use of specified language behaviors in the natural environment. This paper reports an analysis of the general changes in the language, other than that specifically targeted by the incidental teaching procedures, used by disadvantaged preschool children. The daily language samples of disadvantaged children involved in a previously reported experiment to increase compound sentence usage were reexamined and compared to comparable records of other disadvantaged children and of middle-class children of college parents in order to assess possible general effects of the intervention program. Whereas the language that both groups of comparison children used changed little across the preschool year, the amount of talking by the children in the experimental program increased markedly. Their use of more elaborate vocabulary and more elaborate sentences also increased in direct proportion to the increases in overall language use, such that both language use and language elaboration in the experimental group of children changed from a pattern similar to the comparison group of disadvantaged children to a pattern similar to the comparison group of middle-class children. It is argued that some general features of the incidental teaching procedure—differentially attending to child overtures and responding relative to the child's selected topic (reinforcer)—contributed to the increase in overall language use beyond the specific language behavior targeted, and that this increase in the probability of children's talking itself resulted in the substantial increases in elaboration seen in the children's spontaneous language. Because, at least in children with fairly well-developed language repertoires, language use is contextually controlled, talking more involves talking in more varied and complex contexts, which inevitably produces the use of more elaborate language.     

THE FACILITATIVE EFFECTS OF INCIDENTAL TEACHING ON PREPOSITION USE BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN

In a comparison of incidental teaching and traditional training procedures, three language-delayed autistic children were taught expressive use of prepositions to describe the location of preferred edibles and toys. Traditional highly structured training and incidental teaching procedures were used in a classroom setting, and generalization was assessed during free-play sessions. Results clearly indicate that incidental teaching promoted greater generalization and more spontaneous use of prepositions. These findings have important implications for language programming and teacher training, suggesting that incidental teaching should be included as a standard component of language development curricula for autistic and other developmentally delayed children.     

INCREASING AUTISTIC CHILDREN'S DAILY SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

We investigated the effectiveness of teaching parents of 3 autistic boys to use a time delay procedure to increase their children's appropriate spontaneous speech in several naturally occurring daily settings (e.g., saying “good morning” in the morning). Generalization across settings and within settings across persons and locations was assessed. Variation in the children's spontaneous speech was also assessed. In addition procedural errors in the parents' use of time delay were calculated. Results indicated that all children increased their daily spontaneous speech and generalized their speech to other locations and persons.     

Young children use their hands to tell their mothers what to say

Children produce their first gestures before their first words, and their first gesture+word sentences before their first word+word sentences. These gestural accomplishments have been found not only to predate linguistic milestones, but also to predict them. Findings of this sort suggest that gesture itself might be playing a role in the language‐learning process. But what role does it play? Children's gestures could elicit from their mothers the kinds of words and sentences that the children need to hear in order to take their next linguistic step. We examined maternal responses to the gestures and speech that 10 children produced during the one‐word period. We found that all 10 mothers ‘translated’ their children's gestures into words, providing timely models for how one‐ and two‐word ideas can be expressed in English. Gesture thus offers a mechanism by which children can point out their thoughts to mothers, who then calibrate their speech to those thoughts, and potentially facilitate language‐learning.     

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N \(=\) 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control, simulated pSTM deficit, simulated speech perception deficit, or simulated double deficit condition. On long sentences, the double deficit group had lower scores than the control and speech perception deficit groups, and the pSTM deficit group had lower scores than the control group and marginally lower scores than the speech perception deficit group. The pSTM and speech perception groups performed similarly to groups with real deficits in these areas, who completed the control condition. Overall, scores were lowest on noncanonical long sentences. Results show pSTM has a greater effect than speech perception on sentence comprehension, at least in the tasks employed here.     

Development of the use of word order in comprehension

Thirty-three children aged between 19 and 38 months were presented with six reversible active and six reversible passive sentences and were required to act them out. For each child, mean length of utterance was calculated from a sample of spontaneous speech. Mean length of utterance was a more consistent predictor of performance than chronological age. Seven children with a mean length of utterance between 1.0 and 1.5 morphemes per utterance were unable to use the word order information in either type of sentence for comprehension. More developed children could comprehend reversible active sentences but not reversible passives. Children with a mean length of utterance between 3.0 and 3.5 morphemes per utterance systematically reversed the meaning of the reversible passives. The results are discussed in relation to previous studies of word order comprehension and studies of word order in production.This research was supported in part by PHS grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.     

USING TIME DELAY TO PROMOTE SPONTANEOUS SPEECH IN AN AUTISTIC CHILD

One of the frequently observed deficits in autistic children is their lack of spontaneous speech. We used a multiple baseline across behaviors to investigate the effectiveness of a time delay procedure for inducing spontaneous speech in a 10-year-old male autistic child during play. We first taught the child to imitate the experimenter's verbal prompts that described the child's motor response. Once the child reached criteria on imitation, we implemented baseline wherein an immediate verbal prompt for speech was provided after each of the child's motor responses. Intervention consisted of a gradual delay in the presentation of the verbal prompts. The time delay effectively increased the child's spontaneous speech on trained items; some generalization to untrained items also occurred, but only within the same behavioral class of car play. Generalization was also observed across settings. Spontaneous speech remained at high levels during the 4-month maintenance for the behavior of car play but decreased for a second behavior. Decreases in the child's response latencies suggest that spontaneous speech may be an anticipatory verbal response.     

Acoustic emphasis in four year olds

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children’s spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were elicited from 4 year olds who were asked to describe events in a video. Children were found to place more acoustic prominence both on ‘new’ words and on words that were ‘given’ but had shifted to a more accessible position within the discourse. This effect of accessibility concurs with recent studies of adult speech. We conclude that, by age four, children show appropriate, adult-like use of acoustic prominence, suggesting sensitivity to a variety of discourse distinctions.     

INCREASING SPONTANEOUS VERBAL RESPONDING IN AUTUSTIC CHILDREN USING A TIME DELAY PROCEDURE

One oft-cited problem with teaching speech skills to autistic children isthe failure of the speech to be spontaneous. That is, the children's speech often remains underthe control of the verbal behavior of others rather than underthe control of other nonverbal referents inthe environment. We investigatedthe effectiveness of a time delay procedure to increasethe spontaneous speech of seven autistic children. Initially, the experimenter presented a desired object (e.g., cookie) and immediately modeledthe appropriate response “I want (cookie).” Gradually, asthe child imitatedthe vocalization, the experimenter increasedthe time between presentation of the object andthe modeled vocalization in an attempt to transfer stimulus control of the child's vocalization fromthe experimenter's model tothe object. Results indicated that allthe children learned to request items spontaneously and generalized this behavior across settings, people, situations, and to objects which had not been taught. These results are discussed in relation tothe literature on spontaneous speech, prompting, and generalization.     

Language evolution in children with cochlear implants

The capacity to incorporate significant words into the existing vocabulary and to use these words to form sentences with more mature syntactic structures emerges over a considerable time course in young deaf children who have undergone a cochlear implantation. The purpose of this follow-up study is to document the nature and time span of language production--in morphosyntactic and lexical skills--when a child's first experience with language sounds is provided artificially through electrical stimulation. To examine the development of these two aspects of linguistic processing, five deaf French children, all enrolled in similar postimplantation educational settings, were individually assessed at 6-month intervals over a period of 18 months. Computerized analyses were derived from their spontaneous speech in a 20-min standardized play session. Results for mean length of utterance and vocabulary revealed gradually improving performance for most children, in spite of the generally low starting point. Both measures of production nevertheless remained well below the norms established for normally hearing children. Although the achievement of higher production scores, which underlies more effective interpersonal exchanges, is evident after only 1 year of device use, it is clear that improvement does not always occur at the same pace, as shown by two of the children. This emphasizes the importance of longitudinal studies in documenting intersubject variability and intrasubject stability throughout the experience with an implant.     

A comparison of syntax in young stutterers and nonstutterers

This study compares the syntactic structure of the spontaneous speech of a small group of stutterers and nonstutterers, using a method of constituent analysis. Speech samples were taped during play sessions with subjects, and the tapes were then transcribed and analyzed according to preselected constituent criteria. The stutterers were in the early stages of stuttering and had been diagnosed as stutterers by experienced clinicians. The method of analysis proved to be highly reliable. Differences were found in the number of complete clauses, the number of complex sentences, and in clause types between the two groups.     

An unlearned foreign "accent" in a patient with aphasia

Rarely, aphasics may develop what appears to be a foreign accent, as noted by Monrad-Kr?hn whose Norwegian patient sounded German. We describe a right-handed native American who developed a foreign accent following damage to the left premotor region and white matter anterior to the head of the left caudate nucleus. Her aphasia was of the transcortical motor type. Both she and her parents were born in the USA, she never traveled outside the country and never learned a foreign language. Phonetic analysis of her voice taped prior to the stroke revealed normal speech with a midwestern accent. In contrast, analyses of her current spontaneous speech, repetition, and reading reveal shifts in vowels, e.g., /I/----/i/, /ae/----/a/; increased diphthonigization; and tense speech posture. These features, which were especially frequent in spontaneous speech, probably explain her "accent." Acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency contours of sentences read in different emotional tones revealed a restricted range and variability of the peaks and valleys.     

Acoustic correlates of subjective pauses

This study investigates the perception of subjective pauses, i.e., pauses that do not correspond to silent pauses. Experiment I used stimuli which were excerpts from spontaneous speech which were presented in two versions: spectrally normal and spectrally inverted. Experiment II used stimuli which were generated by first cross-splicing the two halves of two sentences; they were further manipulated for fundamental frequency, intensity, or duration of the vowel just preceding the splice point. The task in both experiments was to press a button when a speech interruption was heard. The purpose of the experiments was to identify the grammatical and acoustic correlates of the subjective pauses thus reported. The results of Experiment I show, for the inverted speech condition, but not for the normal speech condition, an increase in pause reports as the duration of the prepausal vowel increased. The results of Experiment II show an increase in pause reports with increasing vowel duration. The implications of increased prepausal duration functioning as a pause signal are discussed.     

Preparing Interventionists via Telepractice in Incidental Teaching for Children with Autism

Telepractice has emerged as a potentially effective means of preparing parents and educators as interventionists for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of telepractice to train interventionists to implement incidental teaching with preschool children with ASD. Three interventionists were taught to implement incidental teaching using a telepractice training package consisting of an online module, self-evaluation, and delayed performance feedback delivered via videoconferencing. A single-case multiple-baseline across-participant design was employed to evaluate the effects of the telepractice training package on interventionist acquisition and maintenance of incidental teaching. The distal effects of interventionist implementation of incidental teaching on child mands were also evaluated. Results showed that following the telepractice training program, interventionist implementation fidelity improved and child mands increased. Within six telepractice sessions, all interventionists reached the preset performance criteria of four consecutive sessions above 90 % fidelity. Changes in interventionist and child behaviors maintained at 2- and 4-week follow-up sessions. Taken together, these results suggest that telepractice is a promising method of providing instruction in incidental teaching to interventionists of young children with ASD.     

Primary grade children's memory for parts of speech.

Developmental differences in elementary school (kindergarten, first and second grade) children's free recall for parts of speech were investigated using sentences with normal and scrambled word order. The children were presented four sentences with normal syntax and four sentences with scrambled word order. There were significant effects of age, syntax, and rate of presentation; these replicated previous research. The unusual finding was that the kindergarten children, when presented with scrambled word strings, recalled more verbs than either the first or second grade children. It was hypothesized that this occurred because either the kindergarten children failed to detect the scrambled nature of syntaxless strings, or there is a change in the comprehension strategies which de-emphasizes the role of the verb.     

Preschool children's use of cues to generic meaning

Sentences that refer to categories - generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly") - are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues. The first three experiments tested whether 3- and 4-year-olds use (a) the immediate linguistic context, (b) their previous knowledge, and (c) the social context to determine whether an utterance with ambiguous scope (e.g., "They are afraid of mice", spoken while pointing to 2 birds) is generic. Four-year-olds were able to take advantage of all the cues provided, but 3-year-olds were sensitive only to the first two. In Experiment 4, we tested the relative strength of linguistic-context cues and previous-knowledge cues by putting them in conflict; in this task, 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, preferred to base their interpretations on the explicit noun phrase cues from the linguistic context. These studies indicate that, from early on, children can use contextual and semantic information to construe sentences as generic, thus taking advantage of the category knowledge conveyed in these sentences.     

ACQUISITION OF SIGN LANGUAGE BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN II: SPONTANEITY AND GENERALIZATION EFFECTS

Autistic children typically do not use their language repertoire in order to communicate. Six autistic children who exhibited poor communication skills were trained to use their sign repertoire to make spontaneous requests of adults. Training consisted of imitative prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement, and included aspects of incidental teaching. The children displayed an increase in the rate and variety of spontaneous sign requests (Experiment 1). Generalization of spontaneity across adults (Experiments 1 and 2) and settings (Experiment 2) was also observed. We suggest that spontaneity may be facilitated when language is brought under the control of broadly defined stimuli such as adult attention rather than narrowly defined stimuli such as the presence of specific objects or verbal prompting in the form of questions. Finally, response generalization was observed as well (Experiment 1). Specifically, as spontaneity increased, self-stimulatory behavior decreased. This result may be accounted for in terms of reinforcer competition, reinforcer consistency, or discriminative stimulus effects.     

Effect of Rate,Intonation, and Sentence Length on Nigerian Children's Imitation of Adults' Utterances

This Nigerian study replicated the work of Bonvillian et al. (1979) on the effects of rate, intonation, and sentence length on children's sentence imitation. Nursery school children (N = 12; M age = 5 years, 0.5 months) were asked to imitate sentences that varied in rate of presentation, intonation, and length. Results revealed better imitation of shorter sentences than longer ones, of sentences read at a rate nearer the children's normal speech rate than those read at a faster or slower rate, and of sentences read with normal intonation than those read with flat intonation. These findings replicated those of Bonvillian et al., while indicating an even stronger effect of intonation in the Nigerian sample, because its effect was not limited to long sentences but affected all sentences. Adults' utterances to children are often slow, with exaggerated intonation. The present findings suggest that such modifications in adults' speech facilitate children's language comprehension.