Inflectional morphology in cri du chat syndrome - A case study

This study examined morphological skills in a girl with cri du chat syndrome, addressing three questions: (1) To what extent does the subject inflect words? (2) To what extent are words inflected correctly? (3) To what extent do the inflected words reflect productive morphological rules, and to what extent can they be considered to be rote-learned? The study draws on two sources of data: a corpus of spontaneous utterances collected when the subject was 14 years old and her performance on a past tense elicitation test at 11;10 and 16;5. It was found that most inflectional forms in the nominal, verbal, pronominal and adjectival paradigms of the target language were attested in the corpus. These forms were in all but a few instances inflected correctly. The most frequent inflection errors were infinitive for present, past or past participle in verbs and wrong gender in determiners. Furthermore, performance on the elicitation test indicated some knowledge of productive inflectional rules of the target language, despite relatively poor phonetic, phonological and syntactic skills. Copyright 2012 Informa UK Ltd

Consonants in Cri du chat syndrome: A case study

This article reports on a longitudinal case study of consonant productions in one Norwegian girl with Cri du chat syndrome from age 4;6 to age 9;4. It was shown that she had many articulation errors throughout the period of observation. Furthermore, these errors were shown to fall into three main categories: 1) errors of differentiation and tuning, 2) errors of coordination and sequencing, and 3) missing gestures. Also, omissions of segments were reported to be frequent. In sum, the consonant productions by this girl were found to be both delayed and deviant, as compared to normally developing children. The number of errors, however, decreased as she grew older, resulting in more accurate renditions of the target words

Vowel productions in the speech of three children with cri du chat syndrome

This paper presents findings from a perceptual and acoustic study of vowel productions in the speech of three children with cri du chat syndrome, all raised in Norwegian-speaking communities. It is shown that for all three subjects there is considerable variation in different attempts at producing the same target vowels, but to a varying extent depending on both vowel height and quantity. There is also inter-subject variation. Furthermore, there is considerable acoustic overlap between attempts at producing different target vowels. Finally, only to a limited extent do the vowel productions of the three children form vowel spaces comparable to the vowel space of the target language, but again there is inter-subject variation. Keywords: Cri du chat syndrome, vowel productions, acoustic analysi

Phonological Development in a Child with Cri du Chat Syndrome (CDCS)

Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) is a genetic disorder resulting from loss of genetic material from the short arm of chromosome 5. Symptoms include delayed linguistic development. In my paper I present results from a longitudinal study of a girl with CDCS, focussing on two areas of phonological development, firstly, the development of consonant inventories, and, secondly, the development of syllable structure. It is shown that although her consonant inventory hardly develops over a period of 2 1/2 years, the way she uses her consonants to build syllables and words develops considerably. At 4;6 her syllables are dominantly of the CV-type, and bisyllabic words are mostly reduplications. At 5;9 the picture is very different: She uses a variety of syllable shapes, and there are almost no reduplications left. This development continues from 5;9 to 7;0. On the basis of these results I conclude my paper with some remarks on possible causes of the articulatory problems seen in children with CDCS

Utvikling og variasjon i kommunikative ferdigheter hos barn som lærer norsk en CDI-basert studie.

Denne artikkelen presenterer funn fra en studie av tidlig kommunikativ utvikling hos ca. 6500 norske, enspråklige barn mellom 8 og 36 måneder. Studien gjorde bruk av en tilpasning til norsk av foreldrerapporteringsinstrumentet MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Data ble samlet inn via Internett. Resultatene blir presentert både i form av generelle utviklingstrender og normer for variasjon innenfor kommunikative gester, produktivt og reseptivt ordforråd og grammatikk, og bekrefter funn fra andre språk der det samme instrumentet har vært brukt. I tillegg fant vi visse klare forskjeller mellom gutter og jenter

The Phonology of Children's Early Words: Trends, Individual Variation, and Parents' Accommodation in Child-Directed Speech

The mental lexicon is dynamic and changes throughout the lifespan, but how does it begin? Previous research has established that children's first words depend on their communicative needs, but also on their phonetic repertoire and phonological preferences. In this paper, we focus on the phonological characteristics of children's first words, primarily looking at word-initial labials and word length in Norwegian children's first words, as well as at how parents accommodate to child patterns in their speech. Comparing the Norwegian child data with data from children speaking five different languages, we examine how the child's emergent lexicon is on the one hand shaped by the input of the ambient language, but on the other hand limited by more common phonological characteristics of child speech. Based on data from parental reports (CDI), we compared the 50 first words in Norwegian to those in Danish, Swedish, English, and Italian, analyzing two phonological aspects: word initial bilabials and word length in syllables. We found that Norwegian-speaking children follow the children speaking these other languages in having an affinity for word initial bilabials, but that the proportions of mono-, di-, and polysyllables vary depending on the language acquired. Comparisons of the Norwegian child data with samples of adult directed speech (ADS) and child-directed speech (CDS) revealed more word-initial bilabials and shorter words among children than among adults. The CDS was more similar to children's speech than ADS concerning the two phonological aspects dealt with here, which suggests that parents accommodate to children in phonologically detailed ways

Terminologi for vansker med språk hos barn og unge – en konsensusstudie

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Development of consonants and vowels in a child with cri du chat syndrome

Language development in persons with cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) has only been described in very general terms. Three tendencies have been noted in the literature: First of all, there is a discrepancy between chronological age and linguistic age in children with CDCS. Second, there is a discrepancy between receptive and expressive linguistic abilities in these children. Third, their articulation is characterized by omissions and substitutions. However, little is known about the exact nature of these articulation problems. In this paper longitudinal phonological data from a Norwegian girl with CDCS are presented and compared to data from normally developing Norwegian-speaking children