Phonological and Articulatory Deficits in the Production of Novel Signs in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.
Lisa Goffman, Laiah Factor, Mitchell Barna and 2 others
PMID 36795546WHAT IT FOUND
Children with developmental language disorder imitated novel signs less accurately than peers, especially in hand orientation.
Adding a meaningful object did not improve sign production. Movement was less stable only for a sign requiring opposite hand motion.
Key findings
01Children with DLD had lower mean phonological accuracy (1.31) than TD peers (1.54) on a 6-point sign feature score.
02Orientation was the least accurate feature (1.24) compared with handshape (1.58) and path (1.44).
03Overall movement variability did not differ by group, but for the empanada maker sign children with DLD had higher variability (15.38) than TD children (9.97).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The motion analysis had many missing data, so the movement findings rest on fewer children than the language group comparison. The study used only a small set of novel signs, so the movement results may not generalize to other signs. It reports the first time point of a larger longitudinal study, not a treatment trial. The DLD group was oversampled, so group sizes are not balanced. No intervention was tested, so it cannot tell therapists whether a sign-based treatment works.
Declared interests
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grants funded the work, awarded to Lisa Goffman.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with DLD have a general articulatory motor deficit. The motion analysis found no overall group difference in movement variability, and the DLD group showed less stable movement only for the empanada maker sign. Do not assume that adding a concrete referent will make novel signs easier to produce, because referent pairing did not improve phonological accuracy or movement stability.