Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(91)90058-C

Cognition

Volume 39, Issue 1, April 1991, Pages 1-50

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90058-C Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper investigates the etiology of developmental dysphasia and its linguistic properties. Data are presented that suggest that at least some cases of dysphasia are associated with an abnormality in a single dominant gene. The results of a series of tests on a large three-generation family, in which half of the members have dysphasia, are reported. These results show that abstract morphology is impaired in these subjects. It is argued further that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that the dysphasics learn the feature-marked lexical items of language as unanalyzed lexical items. They do not have the underlying capacity to learn language by constructing paradigms.

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Citation Excerpt :
For example, an experimental study and a meta-analysis reported by Lammertink et al. (2020) found no evidence for (or against) the differential relationship between procedural learning ability (in the visuo-spatial domain) and grammatical ability in children with and without DLD. This said, it has been shown on multiple occasions that children with DLD are likely to memorise regular forms (e.g., opened) through declarative memory instead of applying the relevant rules through procedural memory (e.g., Gopnik & Crago, 1991) and that they benefit from interventions drawing on explicit grammar rules that are also learnt through declarative memory (Ebbels, 2014). Primary-school children usually engage with FLs in a playful manner, for example, through songs and child rhymes.
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) start learning foreign languages, usually English as a foreign language (EFL), at an increasingly young age. However, current scholarship lacks crucial insights into how children with DLD respond to language learning in classroom settings and how they can be supported in doing so. The purpose of this early efficacy study is to determine whether a business-as-usual curriculum or a new teaching method tailored to the specific needs of pupils with DLD results in (greater) progress in the foreign language (English) and in the school language (Dutch).
The participants were 75 pupils with DLD in the last three years of primary school, learning EFL in special education in the Netherlands. The intervention group (n=41) received 12 lessons following the CodeTaal approach, including metalinguistic instruction of grammar rules, explicit cross-linguistic contrasts and multimodal interaction with the material. The control group (n=34) received their regular English lessons. The study used a pre- to post-test design and compared the performance of the two groups on a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) in English and a narrative task in both English and Dutch.
Only the intervention group significantly improved in their ability to identify ungrammaticalities in English and generalised the learnt rules to new sentences. Although the performance on the GJT predicted accuracy of English narratives, neither group showed a significant decrease of error rates in English. In contrast, the accuracy of Dutch narratives showed improvement, but only in the intervention group. However, the effects were small and there was significant variability in responsiveness to the intervention.
We conclude that pupils with DLD are able to make progress in foreign language learning in a classroom setting if provided with adequate support.
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^☆: We would like to thank Steve Pinker for his very helpful comments about this work in general and specifically for his editorial assistance on this paper. We should also like to thank Jennifer Gurd and John Marshall for their ongoing consultation and Kevin Dunbar and Bob Bracewell for their help on technical aspects of this work. We also thank Susan Mendelson for her assistance in testing the family and Siobhan Moss for her help in the preparation of this manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Social Sciences Committee of the Graduate Faculty, McGill University, 943-00-62 and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 410-90-1744.

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Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder☆

Abstract

Brain and Language

Cognition

Journal of Communication Disorders

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Language development and language disorders

Language disabilities in three twin pairs and their relatives

Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae (Roma)

Developmental speech and language disorders

The grammatical characterization of developmental dysphasia

Linguistics

Neuropathological abnormalities in developmental dysphasia

Annals of Neurology

The basis of childhood dysphasia: A linguistic approach

Clinical linguistics

The grammatical analysis of language disability

On the definition of word

Aphasia and related language disorders in children

Feature-blind grammar and dysphasia

Nature

Feature-blindness: A case study

Language Acquisition

The acquisition of tense and the emergence of lexical subjects in child grammars of English

McGill Working Papers in Linguistics

Test of language development: Intermediate edition

An extended family with an inherited speech disorder

Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology

The use of grammatical morphemes by children with communication disorders