31.625, Review: Romance; Language Acquisition: Aguilar-Mediavilla, Buil-Legaz, López-Penadés, Sanchez-Azanza (2019)

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Subject: 31.625, Review: Romance; Language Acquisition: Aguilar-Mediavilla, Buil-Legaz, López-Penadés, Sanchez-Azanza (2019)

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Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 21:12:06
From: Ann DeVault [devaultann at gmail.com]
Subject: Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2732.html

EDITOR: Eva  Aguilar-Mediavilla
EDITOR: Lucía  Buil-Legaz
EDITOR: Raúl  López-Penadés
EDITOR: Victor A.  Sanchez-Azanza
TITLE: Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Ann DeVault, University of Iowa

SUMMARY 

Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages, edited by Eva
Aguilar-Mediavilla, Lucía Buil-Legaz, Raúl López-Penadés, Victor A.
Sánchez-Azanza, and Daniel Adrover-Roig, is an edited volume of empirical,
comparative studies of typical and atypical language development in Spanish,
Galician, Catalan, and Russian.  It consists of an introduction by the
editors, followed by four chapters regarding language development in preterm
children, four chapters regarding individuals with Specific Language
Impairment (SLI), two chapters regarding Deafness, and three chapters
regarding Down and Williams Syndromes.  The book concludes with an index. 
Each chapter begins with an abstract as well as a list of keywords.  The aim
of the book is to fill a void in research in atypical language development by
focusing on studies of languages other than English, particularly Romance
languages.  While the editors did not state an intended audience for the book,
it is well-suited to teachers or researchers of Romance languages who have a
background or specific interest in linguistics.  It is not
practitioner-friendly, but research-forward with little explanation of the
linguistic variables investigated and infrequent reference to day-to-day
implications of the findings.

The Introduction by the editors clearly established the scarcity of research
on language development in languages other than English and that, while
language acquisition studies in Romance languages have grown in recent
decades, there is little about atypical language development in Romance
languages.  The Introduction also described typical language acquisition in
Romance languages as well as cross-linguistic studies of Romance languages and
English.  The chapter then included an explanation of a usage-based view of
language acquisition and neuroconstructivism, which the authors stated was the
theoretical framework for the book.  Then the editors reviewed atypical
language development literature in the four clinical conditions addressed
within the book (prematurity, SLI, hearing loss, and intellectual disability)
as well as briefly summarized the aims and findings of each chapter.

Part I of the book contains four chapters regarding language acquisition in
preterm children.  Chapter 1, “Neuroconstructivism to understand the effect of
very preterm birth on language and literacy,” by Analisa Guarini, Marigracia
Zuccarini, and Alessandra Sansavini, described preterm birth and its effects
on language and literacy development within a neuroconstructivist framework. 
This was the only non-empirical chapter in the book.  It began with
definitions of preterm birth and a description of neuroconstructivism. The
next section of the chapter presented a review of literature on the effects of
preterm birth on communication and language development and a description of
what was known about acquisition and consolidation of literacy in individuals
born preterm.  The last section of the chapter provided information on early
intervention programs for those born preterm.

 In Chapter 2, Miguel Pérez-Pereira, Manuel Peralbo, and Alberto Veleiro
assessed the language development and executive functioning of low-risk
preterm and full-term children.  The chapter began with a brief explanation of
Ullman’s (2001) dual models of language.  In the study, low-risk preterm
children of different gestational ages (separated into three groups) and a
group of full-term children in Galicia were assessed at 4- and 5-years old on
expressive and receptive language skills, executive functions (working memory
and inhibitory control), and the possible predictive factors of maternal
education, quality of home environment, and cognitive development.  Analyses
compared the gestational age groups on each task.  Linear regression models
were used to identify factors which could act as predictors of language
abilities.  The authors found no significant differences between preterm and
full-term groups on any of the executive function tasks.  Additionally, they
found that cognitive score was the main predictor of linguistic results and
that executive functions had a moderately significant effect on
morphosyntactic production and on grammar understanding.

In Chapter 3, Mariela Resches, Miguel Pérez-Pereira, Raquel Cruz Guerrero, and
Montse Fernández Prieto analyzed the prevalence of risk for language delay in
healthy, low-risk preterm children at 22, 30, and 60 months compared to a
full-term control group and identified which variables increased the
probability of risk of language delay and whether their predictive value
changed over time.  Participants were assessed on receptive and expressive
vocabulary, grammatical development, morphosyntactic production, cognitive
development, non-verbal intelligence, maternal education, risk for maternal
depression, and quality of home environment.  The authors compared mean scores
and percentage of children at risk for language delay in the preterm and
full-term groups and tested for differences in the rate of prevalence of risk
for language delay.  Additionally, a series of stepwise logistic regression
models were used to identify variables that may increase the probability of
risk for language delay.  The authors found no significant differences in the
prevalence of risk for language delay between preterm and full-term children
at early ages, but at 60 months, preterm children more frequently showed a
receptive language delay and had higher instability in the prevalence of risk
for language delay over time.  The regression models suggested cognitive
development, maternal education, and early expressive vocabulary were the most
important predictive factors for language delay. 

In Chapter 4, “Word segmentation and mapping in early word learning:
Differences between full term and moderately preterm infants,” Laura Bosch,
Maria Teixidó, and Thais Agut reported the results of a comparative study of
receptive language acquisition in 9-month old full-term and moderately preterm
infants learning Catalan and/or Spanish by studying simultaneous word
segmentation and mapping while using an eye tracker to record gaze during an
audiovisual dual task.  The total accumulated fixation time and percentage,
percentage of attention time to looming objects, proportion of looking time,
and difference score between mean proportion of total looking time between
targets and distractors were analyzed.  Results indicated only the full-term
participants succeeded in the word mapping task.  The researchers found
comparable behavior between groups during the familiarization phase, but a
significant difference during the test phase.  They also found significant
differences in receptive communication. 

Chapters 5 through 8 made up Part II: Specific Language Impairment (SLI).  In
Chapter 5, Alejandra Auza-Benavides, Christian Peñaloza C., and Chiharu Murata
compared the lexical and grammatical abilities of four- to six-year old
Spanish-speaking children with and without SLI grouped by level of maternal
education.  They sought to determine whether maternal education was a factor
that influenced the lexical and grammatical measures obtained from narrative
samples and whether there was an interaction between maternal education and
SLI.  Using a retell task based on a book with drawings, they tested for
significant mean differences in linguistic factors (mean length of utterance,
total number of words, number of different words, number of talk units, and
number of talk units with percentage of ungrammatical utterances) based on
maternal education and diagnosis of SLI.  Additionally, least squares
regression was used to model the effect of the diagnosis of SLI, level of
maternal education, and the interaction of the two on the linguistic measures.
 The authors found differences in linguistic factors based on maternal
education level, yet maternal education by itself was not associated with
variation in any of the measures and the effect of maternal education varied
between children with and without an SLI diagnosis.  

“Idiom understanding competence of Spanish children with Specific Language
Impairment and Pragmatic Language Impairment,” by Clara Andrés-Roqueta and
Rosa Ana Clemente, explored deficits in the understanding of idioms in
children with language impairment, the role of receptive and expressive
language skills (grammar, vocabulary, pragmatics) in idiom understanding,
whether difficulty in understanding idioms occurred in those with SLI in
general or if it was more related with pragmatic language impairment, and if
competence to reach figurative meaning of idioms improved when given a visual
context.  Children with language impairment (a SLI group and a pragmatic
language impairment group) and an age-matched control group with typical
language development completed linguistic measures and two idiom understanding
tasks (verbal condition and visual condition). The authors found those with
pragmatic language impairment had greater difficulty with idioms than those in
the SLI group and differed from typically developing peers in both the verbal
and visual conditions.  Additionally, idiomatic understanding improved in the
visual condition in those with pragmatic language impairment.

In Chapter 7, Ingrida Balĉiūnienė and Aleksandr N. Kornev analyzed the
narrative skills of Russian children with language impairment using a wordless
picture sequence for storytelling and retelling tasks using “the methodology
of the dynamic approach to narrative assessment.”  They investigated the
impact of session, story complexity, and story mode on measures of narrative
macrostructure (story structure, episode completeness, internal state terms),
narrative microstructure (productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic
complexity), linguistic dysfluency, and language errors.  Two studies were
described, one with 6-year olds with SLI and another with third- and
fourth-graders with dyslexia.  The authors found children with language
impairment were significantly sensitive to experiment session and story mode. 
Additionally, episode completeness was dependent on external factors for both
groups, but children with SLI were more sensitive to story mode, while those
with dyslexia were more sensitive to story complexity.

“Real-time comprehension of sentences in children with SLI: Evidence from eye
movements” by Llorenç Andreu, Nadia Ahufinger, Laura Ferinu, Fernanda Pacheco,
Roser Colomé, and Mónica Sanz Torren was based on the visual world paradigm
(Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). The authors sought to
investigate how Spanish-speaking children with SLI used semantic verb
information during real-time sentence comprehension.  They reported on three
eye-tracking experiments involving spoken language comprehension by children
with SLI; typically developing children matched to the SLI group in age, sex,
and mother tongue; typically developing children matched to the SLI group
according to mean length of utterance in words, sex, and mother tongue; and
typically developing adults.  The participants, materials, procedure, results,
and discussion of each experiment were presented separately.  The first
experiment investigated the proportion of anticipatory looks to the target
picture and the distractors prior to hearing the target noun phrase.  The
second experiment tested whether successful performance in launching
anticipatory eye movements was based on quick use of verb-specific semantic
restrictions or knowledge of simple lexical co-occurrences. Experiment Three
examined the use of verbs to predict arguments and adjuncts in sentence
comprehension.  There were no significant differences between groups in any of
the experiments.  

Chapters 9 and 10 presented studies about hearing loss.  In “Emotion
recognition skills in children with hearing loss: What is the role of
language?,” Francesc Sidera, Elisabet Serrat, Anna Amadó and Gary Morgan
explored how different linguistic-communicative skills influenced the capacity
to recognize emotions from faces at different developmental points in children
with and without hearing loss.  They administered language measures
(expressive vocabulary, cognitive ability, and Linguistic Proficiency
Profile-2) and a facial emotion recognition task to children with prelocutive
bilateral hearing loss and children without hearing loss. In addition, the
authors investigated the variables of age, use of cochlear implants, and level
of hearing loss on emotion recognition. Emotion recognition was linked to
various linguistic-communicative skills in children with hearing loss, whereas
fewer connections were found in hearing children.  Children with cochlear
implants obtained higher scores than those without on the emotion recognition
task, but the difference was not statistically significant.  Likewise, there
were no significant emotion recognition score differences between those with
profound hearing loss and those with lower levels of hearing loss.  

In Chapter 10, “Executive functions and eye fixations in children with
cochlear implant,” María Fernanda Lara Díaz, Carolina Rivera, and Silvia
Raquel Rodríguez examined the executive functions of inhibition, mental
flexibility, and working memory as well as the relationship of visual fixation
patterns on language development and executive function in children with
cochlear implant and hearing children.  One group with cochlear implants and
another with normal hearing completed tests of non-verbal cognition, language,
and executive functions.  For three of the executive function sub-tests, an
eye-tracker was used to measure visual fixation patterns. The authors found
children with cochlear implants showed significantly lower performance on the
language tests as well as on the cognitive flexibility, abstraction,
inhibition, and working memory executive function sub-tests.  Additionally,
children with cochlear implants had different visual fixation patterns than
their hearing peers.

The last part of the book, ‘Genetic syndromes with intellectual disability’,
is comprised of three chapters relating to Down Syndrome and Williams
Syndrome.  In “The relationship between the lexicon and grammar in
Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome,” Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Miguel
Galeote, and María Fernanda Flores Guerrero investigated whether there was an
association between vocabulary size and grammar and whether the patterns of
vocabulary composition in children with Down Syndrome were similar to those of
typically developing children.  The language abilities of children with Down
Syndrome and a group of typically developing children were compared based on
parental reports of communicative development.  Correlations between
vocabulary production and grammar were significant among all tested variables
for the Down Syndrome group, which suggested an association between vocabulary
and grammar, yet the developmental pattern in the group with Down Syndrome was
not similar to that of typically developing children.  Additionally, the
authors found high levels of individual differences among those with Down
Syndrome.

Chapters 12 and 13 provide comparative studies using data from the larger The
Syndroling Project (Diez-Itza et al., 2014).  In “Profiles of grammatical
morphology in Spanish-speaking adolescents with Williams Syndrome and Down
Syndrome,” Eliseo Diez-Itza, Manuela Miranda, Vanesa Pérez, and Verónica
Martínez addressed the syndrome-specific neurodevelopmental profiles of those
with Williams Syndrome and Down Syndrome by comparing the morphological
profiles of adolescents with those disabilities as well as comparisons to
typically developing children.  Using spontaneous conversations, the authors
analyzed the distribution of part-of-speech categories, the frequency of
morphological error by part of speech, and the frequency of each type of
morphological error.  The results suggested distinct profiles for each group. 
While errors were fewer and less frequent in the Williams Syndrome than the
Down Syndrome group, their type and distribution were atypical compared to the
control group.

In Chapter 13, Martha Shiro, Eliseo Díez-Itza, and Maite Fernández-Urquiza
used oral recounts of a wordless animated video to determine the pragmatic
profile in narrative production of individuals with Williams Syndrome in
comparison to a group of typically developing children.  Specifically, they
looked at the organization of the narratives and which evaluative resources
were used by each group in constructing narratives. The researchers analyzed
the number of utterances, number of word types and tokens, mean length of
utterance in words, narrative structure of the video recount and answers to
follow up questions, and evaluative language.  In looking at these elements,
the authors found the narrative lengths and structure were similar between the
Williams Syndrome and typically developing groups and the use of evaluative
language in the Williams Syndrome group was at a level expected for verbal
age, but that the narratives of those with Williams Syndrome lacked overall
coherence and clarity.

EVALUATION

Atypical Language Development in Romance Languages addresses a research gap in
language development with its focus on Romance languages.

The separation of the book into four parts based on diagnoses known to affect
language development is a logical one.  The chapters within each section fit
well together, although the cohesiveness could be enhanced through the
inclusion of a concluding paragraph or two in the Introduction that specifies
how the findings within each section interrelate.  Similarly, references to
findings from other chapters of the book within individual chapters would have
made trends among findings more salient.  The abstract and keywords to begin
each chapter help the reader quickly determine the relevance of the chapter to
their interests.  Each chapter can stand alone since all contain thorough
introductions and reviews of pertinent literature.

There are numerous tables, charts, and figures throughout the book, which
allow the reader to scan through descriptive information and results of the
studies.  In general, the tables and figures are clear and concise, especially
considering the number of tests and linear models used and the large number of
variables in many of the studies.  Unfortunately, several tables lack
notations of significant results and p values.  

The research designs of the experiments in the book are consistently strong. 
The chapters generally contain detailed descriptions of the participants and
inclusion and exclusion criteria and there is emphasis on controlling for
confounding variables.  The literature reviews are extensive, which provides
the reader ample background knowledge.  The analysis techniques used in the
studies are appropriate and the results and conclusions follow from the data. 

While the designs of the studies are sound, the authors’ ability to clearly
convey their research reports is weak at times. For instance, there are
numerous instances of typographical errors as well as awkward wording
throughout the book.  These errors are so prevalent they become distracting.
Similarly, there are inconsistencies in the use of capitalization,
abbreviations, the use of accent marks, the spelling of authors’ names, and
the format of chapter headers throughout the book.  Some authors failed to
define abbreviations, such as TU and %UG (Chapter 5) and EF (Chapter 10),
which makes understanding the results difficult for a non-expert. Other
studies, Chapters 2 and 3 in particular, lack topic sentences, so it becomes
difficult to follow the authors’ arguments.  Generally, there is little
explanation of the significance or implications of study results, which makes
the book poorly-suited to those looking for effective interventions for
language learners with atypical development.  

Several chapters could have been enhanced through more explanation and
description of the variables of interest and the instruments used.  For
instance, Pérez-Pereira, Peralbo, and Veleiro do not define low-risk preterm
until the third page, yet that is the group of interest in the study. 
Similarly, Pérez-Pereira et al. do not mention the location and language of
the study until the Procedures section and “quality of home environment” is
never operationalized even though it is one of the variables of interest.  In
other chapters (Chapters 2, 3, 10, and 11), the authors fail to discuss the
reliability or validity of the instruments used; why each instrument was
chosen; the instruments themselves (number of items, format of the items,
sample items, etc.); and what scores were used and how (raw score, sub-scores,
etc.).  Clear explanations of variables and instruments are key for the reader
in determining the strength of the study, the reasonableness of the authors’
conclusions, and for replicability.

Some of these difficulties in clear explanations and formatting may result
from authors taking on too much within a single chapter.  For instance,
Chapter 7 describes the results of two pilot studies with different
participant characteristics, plus numerous variables.  This breadth of
information led to the authors not having space to explain the results, define
the acronyms used, nor explain what a dynamic approach to narrative assessment
is and why this study is an example.  Similarly, Chapter 8 mentioned the
framework of the visual world paradigm, yet did not explain what the term
meant, which may have resulted from the space constraints of describing three
experiments within a single chapter.  By presenting the three experiments as
separate trials within a single experiment or describing just one of the
three, the authors would have been able to provide the reader more context and
explanation of the theoretical framework of the study.  

Several other chapters may lack clarity because they are parts of larger
studies.  Because the authors described partial groups of participants and
only certain variables and measures, the explanations can be unclear to the
reader.  For instance, in Chapter 3, Mariela Resches et al explained the
measures administered at 10-months and 48-months, yet the chapter was about
the risk for language delay at 22, 30, and 60 months.  If measures are
described, the reader expects an explanation of findings related to those
measures.  In Chapter 11, the grouping of participants was not clearly
described.  Likely, the participant selection and group assignments were valid
and made sense within the larger study, but they were unclear to the reader in
this smaller portion of the study.  Chapters 12 and 13, both parts of The
Syndroling Project, used acronyms and tools that were never defined or
described.  For instance, the authors mentioned using MOR and CLAN programs,
CHAT format, and tools of the CHILDES project without ever defining the
acronyms or giving an explanation of them.  The reader also may question the
generalizability of the findings related to Down and Williams Syndromes given
that two of the three studies included in the book used data from the same
participants.

Overall, the studies in Atypical language development in Romance languages
begin an important and necessary conversation about developmental trajectories
of individuals with disabilities, but the presentation of the research reports
could have been enhanced.  

REFERENCES

Diez-Itza, E. Martínez, V., Miranda, M., Antón, A., Ojea, A.I.,
Fernández-Urquiza, M., Pérez,  V., Fernández Toral, J., García, I., & Medina,
B. 2014. The Syndroling Project: A comparative linguistic analysis of typical
development profiles and neurodevelopmental genetic disorders (Down, Williams
and Fragile X Syndromes). 13th International Conference for the Study of Child
Language. Amsterdam.

Tanenhaus, M.K., Spivey-Knowlton, M.J., Eberhard, K.M., & Sedivy, J.C. 1995.
Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language
comprehension. Science 268, 1632-1634.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7777863.

Ullman, Michael T. 2001. A neurocognitive perspective on language: The
declarative/procedural model. Neuroscience 2, 717-725.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ann DeVault is a PhD. candidate at the University of Iowa with an interest in
the teaching and learning of World Languages by individuals with disabilities.
Previously, she taught Spanish in middle schools and high schools in several
areas of the United States.





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