Purpose The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition introduced a new neurodevelopmental disorder, social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SPCD), that is characterized by deficits in 4 areas of communication. Although descriptions of these areas are provided, no assessment tools for SPCD are recommended. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which items from measurement tools commonly used in assessing pragmatic language impairment and related disorders might be useful in assessing the characteristics of social communication that define SPCD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition . Method Based on a literature search, 594 items from assessment tools commonly used to measure social communication abilities in people with pragmatic language impairment were identified. The first author judged whether each item reflected 1, more than 1, or none of the 4 SPCD diagnostic characteristics. After a brief training process, 5 second raters independently mapped subsets of items to the 6 categories. We calculated the percentage of agreement and Cohen's kappa for each pair of raters in assigning items to categories. Results Percentages of agreement ranged from 76% to 82%, and Cohen's kappa values ranged from .69 to .76, indicating substantial agreement. Sources and item numbers for the 206 items that both raters assigned to the same SPCD feature are provided. Conclusions These items may provide guidance in assessing SPCD and in designing standardized screening and diagnostic measures for SPCD.
The spontaneous expressive language abilities of 9 severely brain-injured children and adolescents and their age-matched normal controls were examined seven times over a 12-month period following injury. Analysis of conversational language samples revealed a relatively stable pattern of language performance for the normal subjects over this time interval. The brain-injured subjects, as a group, demonstrated improvement on the majority of measures, but only a few reached the level of their control subjects and interindividual variability was considerable. Results suggest that the prognosis for clinically significant improvement in severely brain-injured subjects is good; however, deficits in expressive skills remain apparent up to at least 12 months following injury.
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Two studies were conducted to examine speaking rate following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood and adolescence. Study 1 focused on longitudinal changes in speaking rate in 9 subjects with severe TBI and their age-matched control subjects. Physical measurements of speaking rate (in syllables/sec) were made from spontaneous speech samples obtained from each subject during three sampling sessions over a 13-month period. Although the average speaking rate of the group with TBI was slower than that of the control group at all three sampling sessions, an examination of the data from individual subject pairs revealed markedly slower speaking rates in only 5 of the 9 subjects with TBI at the final sampling session. The perceptual significance of slowed speaking rates in these 5 subjects was confirmed through subjective ratings by naive listeners. In Study 2, the contributions of two potential causes of slowed speaking rate were explored: reduced articulatory speed and increased pausing believed to be associated with linguistic processing difficulties. It is hypothesized that articulatory speed and linguistic processing speed may contribute independently to slowed speaking rates more than 1 year after TBI.
ABSTRACT Charles-Luce & Luce (1990) found smaller phonological similarity neighbourhoods in five- and seven-year-old children's expressive lexicons than in an adult receptive lexicon, a finding they interpreted as evidence that children need not employ fine-grained auditory perceptual analyses in lexical processing. In the present investigation, neighbourhood sizes were calculated for an expressive lexicon derived from two vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;0 to 3;0 (Rescorla, 1989; Reznick & Goldsmith, 1989). Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbour; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbours. Very young children must have access to reasonably detailed phonological information in order to create and distinguish among such phonologically similar lexical entries.
Purpose We investigated the finite verb morphology composite (FVMC), a measure associated with developmental language disorder (DLD), in a large community sample to provide evidence on its distribution, its association with other variables, and its sensitivity and specificity. Method We coded percent occurrence of FVMC morphemes in obligatory contexts in archival language samples from 676 six-year-olds conversing with an adult family member. Using multiple regression, we quantified the variance in FVMC scores accounted for by language sample characteristics (number of utterances and obligatory contexts) and child/family variables (performance IQ, family history, maternal education, and adult FVMC). We calculated sensitivity and specificity of low (< 85%) FVMC scores for predicting low (−1 SD ) scores on measures of utterance length, receptive vocabulary, and nonword repetition. Results FVMC scores ranged from 33% to 100% ( M = 93%). Number of obligatory contexts ( R 2 = 3%), performance IQ ( R 2 = 11%), and adult FVMC ( R 2 = 18%) were significant covariates. Sensitivity ranged from 25% to 35%; specificity was from 91% to 92%. Conclusion FVMC scores at the age of 6 years were generally high, but 12% of the participants had FVMCs below 85%, and scores were significantly associated with characteristics of the language samples, children, and adult interlocutors. Sensitivity of the FVMC was considerably lower in this community sample than in previous studies comparing groups of children who met criteria for DLD or typical language. Evidence from large representative samples is important when developing and validating potential clinical markers of DLD.
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