Telepractice as a Reaction to the COVID-19 Crisis: Insights from Croatian SLP Settings

Telepractice facilitates services in exceptional settings and situations. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is certainly such a situation. Due to pandemic-related restrictions, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) needed to adopt new approaches to their professional functioning. The aim of the paper is to examine SLP professionals’ perceptions and application of telepractice in SLP settings in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two hundred and fifty-five SLPs completed an online survey. The results demonstrated that most SLPs had provided direct online therapy, mainly those employed in health care and private practice. The chief reasons for clients’ refusal of therapy delivered via telepractice included the lack of equipment, insufficient independence, and doubts on the effectiveness of telepractice. Although only 3% of SLPs had acquired some formal knowledge of telepractice before the pandemic, over 70% expressed satisfaction with telepractice because it allowed them to provide undisturbed clinical services in an exceptional situation

Influence of internal and external factors on early language skills : A cross-linguistic study

Cross-linguistic studies can provide information about general and language specific features of language development, but relatively few such studies are available in literature. The main aim of the present study was to investigate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the roles of the internal factor of gender and external factors of birth order and parental education level on the development of language in 2-year-old children. We examined 351 children growing up in three European language contexts: Croatian (N = 104), Estonian (N = 141) and Finnish (N = 106). Information on lexical skills and word combination ability was collected using the short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and the influence of background factors on these aspects of language development was investigated. No significant differences were found in lexical skills or word combination ability among the three language groups. These aspects of language development varied significantly with gender, but not with external factors. Our findings suggest that internal factors may influence early language development more than external factors.Peer reviewe

Efficacy, Model of delivery, Intensity and Targets of Pragmatic Interventions for Children with Developmental Language Disorder:A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: It is widely acknowledged that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) predominantly have difficulties in the areas of grammar and vocabulary, with preserved pragmatic skills. Consequently, few studies focus on the pragmatic skills of children with DLD, and there is a distinct lack of studies examining the effectiveness of pragmatic interventions. AIMS: To carry out a systematic review of the literature on pragmatic interventions for children with DLD. METHODS & PROCEDURES: This systematic review was registered with PROSPERO (ID = CRD42017067239). A systematic search in seven databases yielded 1031 papers, of which 11 met our inclusion criteria. The included papers focused on interventions for children with DLD (mean = 3–18 years), enhancing oral language pragmatic skills, published between January 2006 and May 2020, and were based on a group‐study design such as randomized control trial or pre‐post‐testing. Study participants were monolingual speakers. The quality of papers was appraised using the Cochrane Risk of bias tool for randomized controlled trials. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: There was a high degree of variability between the included intervention studies, especially regarding intensity, intervention targets and outcomes. The evidence suggested that pragmatic intervention is feasible for all models of delivery (individual, small and large group) and that interventions for pragmatic language are mostly focused on encouragement of conversation and narrative skills observed through parent–child interaction or shared book‐reading activities. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: This study highlights the importance of promoting and explicitly teaching pragmatic skills to children with DLD in structured interventions. A narrative synthesis of the included studies revealed that in addition to direct intervention, indirect intervention can also contribute to improving oral pragmatic skills of children with DLD. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT? An increasing number of studies have shown that difficulties in acquiring pragmatic language is not only present in children with autism. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE? Interventions for pragmatic language in children with DLD are mostly focused on encouragement of conversation and narrative skills, very often through parent–child interaction or shared book‐reading activities. Interventions that target language pragmatic are feasible for all models of delivery (individual, small and large group). WHAT ARE THE POTENTIAL OR ACTUAL CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS WORK? The efficacy of the existing studies varies, and it is difficult to give recommendations regarding the intensity and duration of the specific intervention. In addition to offering pragmatic intervention directly from a specialist, pragmatic interventions can also be carried out indirectly if the intervention is under the continuous supervision of a specialist

The acquisition of quantification across languages: Some predictions.

In this paper we review factors that are expected to affect the order of acquisition of quantifiers across languages. We draw a distinction between language-wide and language-specific factors as well as factors that relate to the biological and social profile of the learner (such as gender, socio-economic status and schooling). We then propose predictions for what cross-linguistically similar patterns may arise.This exposition provides the theoretical backgroundagainst which a major empirical project has been undertaken, with the goal of documenting the extent to which the acquisition of quantifiers proceeds uniformly across languages. Here we summarize the scope of the project, the specific hypotheses under test, and other factors that must be considered in analysing the outcome of the ongoing empirical work. We conclude by discussing the implications of these investigations for the interface between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition. But first we turn to cross-linguistic similarities in the meaning of quantifiers in the following section

Presentations / Publications

Overview of outputs related to the Global TALES projec

On the role of pragmatics in child-directed speech for the acquisition of verb morphology

Lituanistikos katedraUžsienio kalbų, lit. ir vert. s. katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta

Global TALES

Developing an international protocol for eliciting and analysing personal event narratives from children and adolescents

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal formsLituanistikos katedraUžsienio kalbų, lit. ir vert. s. katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta