Defining language impairments in a subgroup of children with autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder(ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of core impairments in pragmatic language skills, which are found across all ages and subtypes. In contrast, there is significant heterogeneity in language phenotypes, ranging from nonverbal to superior linguistic abilities, as defined on standardized tests of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. The majority of children are verbal but impaired in language, relative to age-matched peers. One hypothesis is that this subgroup has ASD and co-morbid specific language impairment(SLI). An experiment was conducted comparing children with ASD to children with SLI and typically developing controls on aspects of language processing that have been shown to be impaired in children with SLI: repetition of nonsense words. Patterns of performance among the children with ASD and language impairment were similar to those with SLI, and contrasted with the children with ASD and no language impairment and typical controls, providing further evidence for the hypothesis that a subgroup of children with ASD has co-morbid SLI. The findings are discussed in the context of brain imaging studies that have explored the neural bases of language impairment in ASD and SLI, and overlap in the genes associated with elevated risk for these disorders.

Characteristics of language impairment in Parkinson’s disease and its influencing factors

Background:Language impairment is relatively common in Parkinson’s disease(PD),but not all PD patients are susceptible to language problems.In this study,we identified among a sample of PD patients those pre-disposed to language impairment,describe their clinical profiles,and consider factors that may precipitate language disability in these patients.Methods:A cross-sectional cohort of 31 PD patients and 20 controls were administered the Chinese version of the Western Aphasia Battery(WAB)to assess language abilities,and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment(MoCA)to determine cognitive status.PD patients were then apportioned to a language-impaired PD(LI-PD)group or a PD group with no language impairment(NLI-PD).Performance on the WAB and MoCA was investigated for correlation with the aphasia quotient deterioration rate(AQDR).Results:The PD patients scored significantly lower on most of the WAB subtests than did the controls.The aphasia quotient,cortical quotient,and spontaneous speech and naming subtests of the WAB were significantly different between LI-PD and NLI-PD groups.The AQDR scores significantly and positively correlated with age at onset and motor function deterioration.Conclusion:A subset group was susceptible to language dysfunction,a major deficit in spontaneous speech.Once established,dysphasia progression is closely associated with age at onset and motor disability progression.

Non-Word Repetition Performance in Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment(SLI)

Childhood is a critical period for language development, and it is of great importance to discover normal language development and any specific language impairment （SLI） in child language acquisition and then to give them timely diagnosis and treatment. Also it has been previously shown that the non-word repetition task is an efficient assessment tool to screen out those children suspected with SLI. Based on this premise, the present study examined whether the non-word repetition task can be a suitable screening tool to detect language disorders for preschool children in Mandarin Chinese in China. A non-word repetition task was adapted specifically for this purpose. This study examined differences in non-word repetition performance of Mandarin-speaking preschool children screened by a criterion-referenced diagnostic test of specific language impairment （SLI） （the value of Cronbach Alpha at 0.86）. A sample of 282 children were administered the diagnostic test, and a total of 23 SLI suspects were screened out as their language ability measures deviated from the mean by 1.5 SDs. Results indicated that children with SLI made no error with respect to tone in Mandarin, but they showed great difficulty in non-word repetition skills compared to age-matched controls. The findings confirmed that the non-word repetition task is a culturally nonbiased index of language disorders, and that two syllable non-words can be used to identify language disorder.

Visualizing Aphasia in Linguistics From 2000 to 2019

This paper aims to visualize the research of aphasia from a linguistic perspective for the two decades from 2000 to 2019,identifying the changes in research focus and the future emerging trends of aphasia studies in linguistics.Applying the bibliometric approach,the present study reviewed 3,004 publications with the topic word“aphasia”in the framework of linguistics.The dataset was created from the Web of Science database ranging from 2000 to 2019.Using the CiteSpace tool,document co-citation analysis,betweenness centrality(BC)measurement and citation burst detection were conducted to explore and determine the thematic patterns,critical studies,and emerging trends of this knowledge domain.Twelve thematic patterns in these two decades were identified,indicating that researchers have focused on language impairment in aphasia,aphasia therapy and other topics associated with aphasia.Meanwhile,papers with high BC reveal the connections among different research clusters.In addition,bursts of detected citations demonstrate that treatment aiming at the enhanced quality of daily life,the utilization of discourse tasks and treatments at the discourse level,deeper exploration of primary progressive aphasia in terms of clinical data and the application of working memory assessment,and the role of working memory(WM)training in rehabilitation will possibly attract more attention in the future.On the basis of the cluster landscape,BC and citation bursts,the review found that scholars paid extensive attention to the alleviation of communication deficits in the linguistic exploration of aphasia.