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Articles on Oral Language
Tiwari, S., Karanth, P. & Rajashekar, B. (2017). Specific language impairment in a morphologically complex agglutinative Indian language – Kannada, Journal of Communication Disorders, 66, 22-39.
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) remains an under-investigated disorder in morphologically complex languages such as Kannada. This study tested two existing theories behind SLI: the morphological richness theory and the computational grammatical complexity hypothesis. The results of this study, focusing on 15 Kannada-speaking children with SLI, supported the first of these theories. It showed that children with SLI learning Kannada had similar problems to SLI children learning English. However SLI children learning Kannada had far fewer problems with syntactic morphology (understanding word forms and sentence structures) than those learning English.
Mesa, C., Newbury, D.F., Nash, M., Clarke, P., Esposito, R., Elliot, L., De Barbieri, Z., Fernández, M.A., Villanueva, P., Hulme, C. & Snowling, M.J. (2020). The effects of reading and language intervention on literacy skills in children in a remote community: An exploratory randomized controlled trial, International Journal of Educational Research, 100.
This study explored the effects of a 27-week reading and language intervention, for low-income children living in a remote Chilean community. At the end of the intervention, children in the intervention group showed improvements compared to the waiting group on pre-literacy (a range of skills that include a child's ability to identify letters, numbers, or shapes), reading, language, and reading comprehension measures. The gains in pre-literacy skills, word reading and word knowledge were maintained at 9-month delayed follow-up, though the improvements in language and reading comprehension were not. The findings therefore suggest that language and literacy programs can be useful for improving attainment in children living in disadvantaged and isolated communities.
John, S., & Rajashekhar, B. (2014). Word retrieval ability on semantic fluency task in typically developing Malayalam-speaking children, Child Neuropsychology, 20(2), 182-195.
Word-retrieval abilities in children can be assessed using word generation or verbal fluency tasks. The ability to retrieve a word is related to the individual’s ability to retrieve associated words from the mental lexicon (a kind of mental dictionary) in an organized manner. This study focused on these development aspects in 1,015 Malayalam-speaking children between the ages of 5 and 15 across both genders. It established that there was no significant variation in development of word retrieval abilities between genders, with linear development indicated across the age span.
Cabell, S., Puranik, C.S., & Tortellini, L. (2014). Supporting early literacy skills through preschool writing instruction in classroom and therapeutic contexts, Perspectives, 21(3), 88-97.
In this article, the authors outline how writing during the preschool years is connected with the development of literacy and briefly discuss research on early writing development in children with language impairments. Next, the authors describe ways in which early writing can be assessed and facilitated both in therapeutic contexts and early childhood classrooms, including the collaborative role speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can play in providing early writing support for preschoolers.
