Is There an Increased Familial Prevalence of Psychopathology in Children With Nonverbal Learning Disorders?

The cognitive and behavioral symptoms of nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD) have been described by previous investigators. Nevertheless, we know far less about the potential genetic contributions that may predispose a child to have NLD. An endophenotype model was investigated in 5 samples of children ages 9 to 15 years: NLD (n = 32); reading disorders (RD; n = 59); participants with a psychiatric diagnosis but without a learning disability (n = 55); typically developing controls (n = 31); and children with velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS), a chromosomal deletion syndrome that has been proposed as being an exemplar of NLD (VCFS + NLD; n = 20). Based on a family genetic interview, the authors’ data suggest that children with NLD, RD, or a psychiatric diagnosis have a higher prevalence rate of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and substance abuse/dependence. Psychiatric controls and children with NLD—but not children with RD— showed higher prevalence rates of familial bipolar disorder.

Long-term outcomes for individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication: Part I – what is a “good” outcome?

from AAC: Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Over the past 20 years, there have been many advances in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Despite these advances, there are no data on the long-term outcomes of AAC interventions. This study evaluated the long-term outcomes for a group of seven young men (ages 19 – 23 years) who had used AAC systems for at least 15 years and were part of the first generation to have received AAC services since they were in preschool. Outcomes were measured in the following domains: (a) receptive language; (b) reading comprehension; (c) communicative interaction; (d) linguistic complexity; (e) functional communication; (f) educational and vocational achievement; (g) self-determination; and (h) quality of life. The outcomes for the group were diverse, with individual variations across all measures. Evaluation of the data raised many issues surrounding the challenges of outcomes measurement; these are discussed with suggestions for future research.

Cochlear implant candidacy in the United States: Prevalence in children 12 months to 6 years of age

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Objective
Pediatric cochlear implantation has been demonstrated to be effective for children as well as cost effective for society. One of Healthy People 2010 goals is to increase the number of people who are deaf or significantly hard of hearing to begin to use a cochlear implant system. NIDCDs Healthy Hearing Progress Reports from 1999 reported that only 2 out of every 1000 adults who are deaf or hard of hearing received a cochlear implant. There were two main objectives for this study: (1) to estimate the number of children between the ages of 12 months and 6 years of age with severe to profound bilateral hearing loss who could benefit from a cochlear implant and (2) to determine if the number of children projected to be candidates received this medical care.

Methods
Using the 2000 US Census Data from children 12 months to 6 years, the number of children with severe to profound bilateral hearing loss was calculated. Children who would be considered “neurologically devastated” and the children with absent eighth nerves were excluded from the calculations.

Results
Based on the total population of slightly over 231 million, 15,219 children presented with severe to profound hearing loss. Taking into account some exclusions, 12,816 children would be considered cochlear implant candidates. Based on the number of children who were implanted in 2000, approximately 55% of the projected number of candidates received a cochlear implant.

Conclusion
Even though the estimates do not reflect a direct measure of actual candidates in the targeted age groups, the population who could benefit from this technology is still being significantly underserved in the United States. With a continued shortage of qualified personnel to serve these children, insufficient reimbursement rates, and disparities in implantation rates based on ethnicity and socioeconomic status, the question remains can we truly meet the needs of these children?

Hospital-based universal newborn hearing screening for early detection of permanent congenital hearing loss in Lagos, Nigeria

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Objective
To determine the feasibility and effectiveness of hospital-based universal newborn hearing screening programme for the early detection of permanent congenital or early-onset hearing loss (PCEHL) in Lagos, Nigeria.

Methods
A cross-sectional pilot study based on a two-stage universal newborn hearing screening by non-specialist health workers using transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE) and automated auditory brainstem-response (AABR) in an inner-city maternity hospital over a consecutive period of 40 weeks. The main outcome measures were the practicality of screening by non-specialist staff with minimal training, functionality of screening instruments in an inner-city environment, screening coverage, referral rate, return rate for diagnosis, yield of PCEHL and average age of PCEHL confirmation.

Results
Universal hearing screening of newborns by non-specialist staff without prior audiological experience is feasible in an inner-city environment in Lagos after a training period of two-weeks. Notwithstanding excessive ambient noise within and outside the wards, it was possible to identify a test site for TEOAE screening within the hospital. The screening coverage was 98.7% (1330/1347) of all eligible newborns and the mean age of screening was 2.6 days. Forty-four babies out of the 1274 who completed the two-stage screening were referred yielding a referral rate of 3.5%. Only 16% (7/44) of babies scheduled for diagnostic evaluation returned and all were confirmed with hearing loss resulting in an incidence of 5.5 (7/1274) per 1000 live births or a programme yield of 5.3 (7/1330) per 1000. Six infants had bilateral hearing loss and the degree was severe (≥70 dB nHL) in three infants, moderate (40 dB nHL) in one infant and mild (<40 dB nHL) in two infants. The age at diagnosis ranged from 46 days to 360 days and only two infants were diagnosed within 90 days.

Conclusions
Hospital-based universal hearing screening of newborns before discharge is feasible in Nigeria. Non-specialist staff are valuable in achieving a satisfactory referral rate with a two-stage screening protocol. However, a more efficient tracking and follow-up system is needed to improve the return rate for diagnosis and age of confirmation of hearing loss.

Sudden Hearing Loss

from Otolaryngologic Clinics of North America

Sudden sensorineural hearing loss is a medical emergency in search of an appropriate treatment. Almost all aspects of this disease process are disputed in the literature. The natural course of the disease process has not been well defined, although spontaneous recovery in a percentage of patients appears well accepted. Little scientific data exist to develop an evidence-based treatment protocol. The more common elements of treatment in the United States include oral steroid therapy, transtympanic steroid therapy, and potentially oral antiviral therapy. Other therapies are used with great frequency, and their potential should not be discounted.

The role of bone anchored hearing aids in children with Down syndrome

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Objectives
To evaluate complication rates and outcomes of children with Down syndrome fitted with a Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (Baha®). To evaluate whether the Bone Anchored Hearing Aid is a successful form of aural rehabilitation in children with Down syndrome from a patients’ perspective.

Study design
Retrospective case analysis and postal questionnaire study.

Setting
The Birmingham Children’s Hospital, UK.

Methods
A total of 15 children were fitted with a Baha® between February 1992 and February 2007. The age range was 2–15 years. A postal questionnaire was sent to each family. The Glasgow Children’s Benefit Inventory (GCBI) was used in this study.

Outcome measures
Implantation results, skin reactions and other complications were recorded. Quality of life after receiving a Baha® was assessed with the GCBI.

Results
All 15 patients are using their Baha® 7 days a week for more than 8 h a day after a follow-up of 14 months with continuing audiological benefit. No fixtures were lost, and skin problems were encountered in 3 (20%). Regarding quality of life, all 15 patients had improved social and physical functioning as a result of better hearing.

Conclusions
Baha® has an important role in the overall management of individuals with Down syndrome after conventional hearing aids and/or ventilation tubes have been considered or already failed. This study has shown a 20% rate of soft tissue reaction and there were no fixture losses in this group. No significant increase in complication rates was identified in children with Down syndrome. Finally, there was a significantly improved quality of life in children with Down syndrome after receiving their Baha®. There was a high patient/carer satisfaction with Baha®. Two of our series had bilateral two stage fixture procedures without any complications. More consideration should be given to bilateral bone anchored hearing aids in this group.

Language skills develop at 6, say researchers

from EurekAlert.org

Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults.

Acquiring causatives in Taiwan Southern Min

from the Journal of Child Language

This case study is based on the longitudinal data of a girl (LYC, 1 ; 2–3 ; 3) acquiring Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) as her first language, and it aims to discover the overgeneralization pattern of children acquiring causatives in TSM. Among the three types of causative, the errors found in other languages are mostly with lexical causatives; however, in TSM, the errors occur with morphological and analytic causatives. Being an analytic language, TSM tends to spell out the causative meaning through morphological and analytic causatives and thus most errors occur with these two types. In contrast, lexical causatives, which contain a semantic element CAUSE, were acquired late; in the data collected (1 ; 2–3 ; 3) lexical causatives were not yet found. This case study provides evidence from TSM to show a different overgeneralization pattern.

Developing spatial localization abilities and children’s interpretation of where

from the Journal of Child Language

Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where. In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children’s non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in response to where questions about an object, rooms on the same floor and on a different floor. All children pointed to the location of the hidden objects. The youngest children pointed to the route to rooms while the oldest children were more likely to point to the location of rooms. With age, the children gradually used more spatial location terms than deictic terms in response to where. These results suggest that children’s meaning of where initially differs for different sized spaces and developmental changes reflect non-verbal cognition.

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability

from the Journal of Child Language

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n=68) and adults (n=19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed early mastery of some grammatical structures (e.g. word order, article omissions) while even the oldest children differed from adults on others (e.g. past tense, third person singular agreement). Working memory capacity and phonological ability accounted for variance in grammaticality judgments above and beyond age effects. In particular, working memory capacity correlated with structures involving verb morphology and word order; phonological ability was important for structures with low phonetic substance. Children’s relative difficulty with the different constructions showed parallels to adult performance under memory load stress, indicating working memory capacity may be a limiting factor in their performance. Implications for performance by memory and phonologically impaired populations are discussed.

Noun grammaticalization and determiner use in French children’s speech: A gradual development with prosodic and lexical influences

from the Journal of Child Language

This study investigates when and how French-learning children acquire the main grammatical constraint on the noun category, i.e. the obligatory use of a preceding determiner. Spontaneous speech samples coming from the corpora of twenty children in each of three age groups, 1 ; 8, 2 ; 6, 3 ; 3, were transcribed and coded with respect to morphosyntactic, lexical and length properties of nouns. Results indicate that noun grammaticalization is a gradual process which involves early transitional procedures, as well as an increasing diversity in the content and contexts of determiner use. In support of prosodic hypotheses, noun length effects (in favor of monosyllabic nouns) mostly occurred at 1 ; 8. Animacy effects supporting the lexical hypothesis (in favor of inanimate nouns) occurred at 2 ; 6 and 3 ; 3. We suggest that noun grammaticalization is influenced by both prosodic and lexical factors. Prosodic influences

Object and action picture naming in three- and five-year-old children

from the Journal of Child Language

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children’s language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures. In Experiment 1, action pictures produced more errors than object pictures for the three-year-olds, but not the five-year-olds. A qualitative analysis of the errors revealed a somewhat different pattern of errors across age groups. In Experiment 2 there was no robust difference in accuracy for the actions and objects but naming times were longer for actions. Across both experiments, imageability was a robust predictor of object naming performance, while spoken frequency was the most important predictor of action naming. The results are discussed in terms of possible differences in the manner in which nouns and verbs are acquired.

Repetition as ratification: How parents and children place information in common ground

from the Journal of Child Language

Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult–child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said. Analysis of 978 exchanges containing repetitions showed that adults use them to check on intentions and to correct errors, while children use them to ratify what the adult said. With younger children, adults combine their repeats with new information. Children then re-repeat the form originally targeted by the adult. With older children, adults check on intentions but less frequently, and only occasionally check on forms. Older children also re-repeat in the third turn but, like adults, add further information. For both adults and children, repeats signal attention to the other’s utterances, and place the information repeated in common ground.

The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study

from the Journal of Child Language

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the development, more complex relative constructions emerge, in which the relative clause is embedded in a fully-fledged main clause. We argue that German relative clauses develop in an incremental fashion from simple non-embedded sentences that gradually evolve into complex sentence constructions.

The representation of morphologically complex words in the developing lexicon

from the Journal of Child Language

The study reported here examined the manner in which children represent morphologically complex words in the lexicon. Children in grades 1 to 5 completed a fragment completion task to assess the priming effects of morphologically related words. Both inflected and derived words (e.g. needs and needy, respectively) were more effective primes than control words (e.g. needle) that share similar orthography and phonology with the target word (e.g. need). These effects were consistent across the developmental period studied. Further, equivalent priming effects from the inflected and derived forms suggest that these word types are represented similarly in the developing lexicon.