Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T12:13:16.283Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Dense home-based recordings reveal typical and atypical development of tense/aspect in a child with delayed language development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2017

IRIS CHIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
MATTHEW S. GOODWIN
Affiliation:
Department of Health Sciences, Northeastern University
SOROUSH VOSOUGHI
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab
DEB ROY
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab
LETITIA R. NAIGLES
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
*
Address for correspondence: Iris Chin, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-1020. tel: (860) 486-4942; E-mail: iris.chin@uconn.edu

Abstract

Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency, consistency, and productivity of past, present, and future usage, using the Speechome Recorder, which enables collection of dense, longitudinal audio-video recordings of children's speech. Samples were collected longitudinally in a child who was previously diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, but at the time of the study exhibited only language delay [Audrey], and a typically developing child [Cleo]. While Audrey was comparable to Cleo in frequency and productivity of tense/aspect use, she was atypical in her consistency and production of an unattested future form. Examining additional measures of densely collected speech samples may reveal subtle atypicalities that are missed when relying on only few typical measures of acquisition.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R01 2DC007428), and by ARRA Supplement 3R01DC007428-0451. We would like to thank Devin Rubin and Andrea Tovar for helping recruit families, Emily Potrzeba and Michelle Cheng for transcribing the immense dataset, and Julia Mertens for assisting in the coding of the utterances. We also thank Maria Coppola, other UCONN developmental psychology colleagues, and attendants of IMFAR 2012 in Toronto, ON and SRCD 2013 in Seattle, WA for providing helpful feedback. Finally, we are grateful for our two families that participated in this study and who agreed to have the Speechome Recorder installed in their homes. This paper was prepared from the first author's Master's Thesis.

References

REFERENCES

Akhtar, N. & Tomasello, M. (1997). Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. Developmental Psychology 33, 952–65.Google Scholar
Altman, D. G. (1991). Practical statistics for medical research. London: Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
Bartolucci, G., Pierce, S. J. & Streiner, K. (1980). Cross-sectional studies of grammatical morphemes in autistic and mentally retarded children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 10(1), 3949.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, L. (1970) Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 21(4), 491504.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Capirci, O., Sabbadini, L. & Volterra, V. (1996). Language development in Williams Syndrome: a case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology 13(7), 1017–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B.F. Skinner's verbal behavior. Language 35, 2658.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H. & Almazan, M. (2001). Compounding and inflection in language impairment: evidence from Williams Syndrome (and SLI). Lingua 111(10), 729–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2(3), 267–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. 2006. Word-minimality, epenthesis, and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Language & Speech 49, 137–74.Google Scholar
Eigsti, I. & Bennetto, L. (2009). Grammaticality judgments in autism: deviance or delay. Journal of Child Language 36(5), 9991021.Google Scholar
Eigsti, I. M., Bennetto, L. & Dadlani, M. B. (2007). Beyond pragmatics: morphosyntactic development in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37, 1007–23.Google Scholar
Gleason, J. B. & Ely, R. (2002). Gender differences in language development. In De Lisi, A. M. & De Lisi, R. (eds), Biology, society, and behavior: the development of sex differences in cognition, 127–54. Westport, CT: Ablex.Google Scholar
Green, L. J. (2002). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. (Ed.) (2012), Research methods in child language: a practical guide. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Howlin, P. (1984). The acquisition of grammatical morphemes in autistic children: a critique and replication of the findings of Bartolucci, Pierce, and Streiner, 1980. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 14(2), 127–36.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. & Wexler, K. (1993). On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 24(3), 421–59.Google Scholar
Kanner, L. (1946). Irrelevant and metaphorical language in early infantile autism. American Journal of Psychiatry 103, 242–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. B. (2015). Language symptoms and their possible sources of Specific Language Impairment. In Bavin, E. L. & Naigles, L. R. (eds), The Cambridge handbook of child language, 2nd ed. (pp. 545–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B., Caselli, M. C., Bortolini, U., McGregor, K. K. & Sabbadini, L. (1992). Morphological deficits in children with specific language impairment: the status of features in the underlying grammar. Language Acquisition 2(2), 151–79.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. & Behrens, H. (2012). Dense sampling. In Hoff, E. (ed.), Research methods in child language: a practical guide (pp. 226239). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lord, C., Rutter, M., Goode, S., Heemsbergen, J., Jordan, H., Mawhood, L. & Schopler, E. (1989). Autism diagnostic observation schedule: a standardized observation of communicative and social behavior. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 19(2), 185212.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1990). The child language data exchange system: an update. Journal of Child Language 17, 457–72.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J. & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 54(4) (Serial No. 228).Google Scholar
Maslen, R. J., Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. & Tomasello, M. (2004). A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregularization in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(6), 1319–33.Google Scholar
Mullen, E. M. (1995). Mullen Scales of Early Learning. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.Google Scholar
Naigles, L. R. (2012). Not sampling, getting it all. In Hoff, E. (ed.), Guide to research methods in child language (pp. 240–53). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Newcombe, R. G. (1998) Two-sided confidence intervals for the single proportion: comparison of seven methods. Statistics in Medicine 17, 857–72.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. & Hadley, P. (2008). Morphosyntax in child language disorders. In. Schwartz, R. G. (ed.). The handbook of child language disorders, 341–64. New York, NY: Psychological Press.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. B. & Horohov, J. E. (1997). Past-tense marking by children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 40(1), 6274.Google Scholar
Park, C. J., Yelland, G. W., Taffe, J. R. & Gray, K. M. (2012). Morphological and syntactic skills in language samples of preschool aged children with autism: Atypical development? International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 14(2), 95108.Google Scholar
Paul, R. & Alforde, S. (1993). Grammatical morpheme acquisition in 4-year-olds with normal, impaired, and late-developing language. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 36(6), 1271–5.Google Scholar
Rescorla, L. (1989). The Language Development Survey: a screening tool for delayed language in toddlers. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 54, 589–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rescorla, L. (2013). Late-talking toddlers: a fifteen-year follow-up. In Rescorla, L. A. & Dale, P. S. (eds), Late talkers: language development, intervention, and outcomes, 219–40. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.Google Scholar
Rescorla, L., Dahlsgaard, K. & Roberts, J. (2000). Late-talking toddlers: MLU and IPSyn outcomes at 3;0 and 4;0. Journal of Child Language 27, 643–64.Google Scholar
Rescorla, L. & Roberts, J. (2002). Nominal versus verbal morpheme use in late talkers at ages 3 and 4. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45(6), 1219–31.Google Scholar
Rescorla, L. & Turner, H. L. (2015). Morphology and syntax in late talkers at age 5. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 58(2), 434–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L., Taylor, C. L. & Zubrick, S. R. (2008). Language outcomes of 7-year-old children with or without a history of late language emergence at 24 months. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 51(2), 394407.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L., Warren, S. F. & Betz, S. K. (2005). Language symptoms of developmental language disorders: an overview of autism, Down syndrome, fragile X, specific language impairment, and Williams syndrome. Applied Psycholinguistics 26(1), 727.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L. & Wexler, K. (1996). Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39, 1239–57.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K. & Cleave, P. L. (1995). Specific language impairment as a period of extended optional infinitive. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 38(4), 850–63.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K. & Hershberger, S. (1998). Tense over time: the longitudinal course of tense acquisition in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 41(6), 1412–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., Marquis, J. & Hershberger, S. (2000). Acquisition of irregular past tense by children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 43(5), 1126–44.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K. & Redmond, S. M. (1999). Grammaticality judgments of an extended optional infinitive grammar: evidence from English-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42, 943–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rispoli, M., Hadley, P. A. & Holt, J. K. (2009). The growth of tense productivity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52, 930–44.Google Scholar
Roberts, J. A., Rice, M. L. & Tager–Flusberg, H. (2004). Tense marking in children with autism. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(3), 429–48.Google Scholar
Roy, D., Patel, R., DeCamp, P., Kubat, R., Fleischman, M., Roy, B., … Gorniak, P. (2006). The Human Speechome Project. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Cognitive Science Conference.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutter, M., LeCouteur, A. L. & Lord, C. (2003). Autism Diagnostic Interview–Revised. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.Google Scholar
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: the emergence of displaced reference in parent–child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language, Vol. 4 (pp. 128). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Shirai, Y. (1998). The emergence of tense–aspect morphology in Japanese: Universal predisposition? First Language 18, 281309.Google Scholar
Shirai, Y. & Andersen, R. W. (1995). The acquisition of tense–aspect morphology: a prototype account. Language 71(4), 743762.Google Scholar
Snyder, W. (2011). Children's grammatical conservatism: implications for syntactic theory [Plenary Address]. In Danis, N., Mesh, K., and Sung, H. (eds), BUCLD 35: Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. I, 120. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Squires, J. & Bricker, D. (2009). Ages & Stages Questionnaires, 3rd ed. (ASQ-3). Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.Google Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H. (1989). A psycholinguistic perspective on language development in the autistic child. In Dawson, G. (Ed), Autism: nature, diagnosis, and treatment (pp. 92115). New York, NY: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H. & Calkins, S. (1990). Does imitation facilitate the acquisition of grammar? Evidence from a study of autistic, Down's syndrome and normal children. Journal of Child Language 17(3), 591606.Google Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H., Calkins, S., Nolin, T., Baumberger, T., Anderson, M. & Chadwick-Dias, A. (1990). A longitudinal study of language acquisition in autistic and Down syndrome children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 20, 121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tek, S., Mesite, L., Fein, D. & Naigles, L. (2014). Longitudinal analyses of expressive language development reveal two distinct language profiles among young children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 44(1), 7589.Google Scholar
Tomblin, J. B. (2015). Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In Bavin, E. L. & Naigles, L. R. (eds), The Cambridge handbook of child language, 2nd ed., 527–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tommerdahl, J. & Kilpatrick, C. (2013). Analysing frequency and temporal reliability of children's morphosyntactic production in spontaneous language samples of varying lengths. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 29(2), 171–83.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209–53.Google Scholar
Valian, V. (2006). Young children's understanding of present and past tense. Language Learning and Development 2(4), 251–76.Google Scholar
Volterra, V., Caselli, M. C., Capirci, O., Tonucci, F. & Vicari, S. (2003). Early linguistic abilities of Italian children with Williams syndrome. Developmental Neuropsychology 23(1/2), 3358.Google Scholar
Vosoughi, S., Goodwin, M. S., Washabaugh, B. & Roy, D. (2012). A portable audio/video recorder for longitudinal study of child development. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ‘12) (pp. 193–200). New York, NY: ACM.Google Scholar
Wagner, L. (2001). Aspectual influences on early tense comprehension. Journal of Child Language 28(3), 661–81.Google Scholar
Wagner, L. (2012). First language acquisition. In Binnick, R. I. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect (pp. 458480). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, L., Swensen, L. D. & Naigles, L. R. (2009). Children's early productivity with verbal morphology. Cognitive Development 24(3), 223–39.Google Scholar
Waterhouse, L. & Fein, D. (1982). Language skills in developmentally disabled children. Brain and Language 15, 307–33.Google Scholar
Wexler, K. (1996). The development of inflection in a biologically based theory of language acquisition. In Rice, M. L. (ed.), Toward a genetics of language (pp. 113114). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Google Scholar
Williams, D., Botting, N. & Boucher, J. (2008) Language in autism and specific language impairment: Where are the links? Psychological Bulletin 134, 944–63.Google Scholar