Language impaired children have exhibited difficulty with comprehending nonliteral language, a skill that is necessary to become an effective participant in daily communicative interactions. Young adults who have had such disorders as children continue to report difficulty with rapid, humorous conversational exchanges, a situation in which nonliteral language forms such as idioms, irony, hyperbole, and hints are likely to occur. In order to understand such nonliteral forms, listeners use linguistic knowledge such as prior utterance and conventionality of form, paralinguistic knowledge such as intonation, and nonlinguistic knowledge such as knowledge of the speaker and nonverbally conveyed knowledge of preceding events. The proposed series of studies is designed to examine the routes that language impaired children take to achieving nonliteral language comprehension. Subjects will be 120 children who will be seen four times over the course of 4 years. Forty language impaired children, aged 9:0 - 9:11 at the initial testing, will be compared with two control groups, one younger group of normally developing children matched on mean language age, and a group of normally developing children matched to the language impaired children on mean nonverbal mental age. The series of experimental tasks will examine children's ability to use event context information that is linguistically vs. nonlinguistically conveyed, intonation, speaker knowledge, conventionality of ironic form, and semantic domain (physical vs. mental states) to understand that speakers, when using irony or idioms, often to not mean exactly what they say. The general paradigm for the studies will involve presentation of a series of brief videotaped or audiotaped vignettes with questions about the meaning and purpose of target utterances presented after each vignette. The children's ability to use linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic knowledge sources will be examined relative to normally developing children and also will be examined longitudinally in order to better understand the nature of individual differences in nonliteral language comprehension.
| Ford, Janet A; Milosky, Linda M (2003) Inferring emotional reactions in social situations: differences in children with language impairment. J Speech Lang Hear Res 46:21-30 |
