Vocabulary Deficits of Children with SLI
Children with SLI can learn words, but they need more exposures to new words than children who are typically developing. These children are also less able to retain newly learned words over time. Debate exists about the types of language features that children (both those with and without SLI) use to learn and retain vocabulary and about the role working memory and other nonlinguistic skills play in word learning. Research we have conducted to examine these issues includes studies on children’s quick incidental learning of words, children’s use of syntax to learn verbs, and the effects of input manipulations on word learning.
These video clips are from stimuli that were used in a study published by Oetting (1999). The study examined the syntactic bootstrapping skills of children with SLI to interpret and retain the meanings of novel verbs. Syntactic bootstrapping is the ability to use the surrounding grammar of a sentence to “hone in” on the meaning of a novel verb. Consider the first clip of the monkey and bear and suppose you heard the word Kibbing while you viewed it. What does kibbing mean? It all depends on the syntax that you hear with the word.
Bear & Monkey Buster the Clown
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If you heard
The bear is kibbing the monkey, kibbing would mean feeding.
If you heard
The bear and the monkey are kibbing, kibbing would mean eating.
The second is an excerpt from a story about Buster the Clown. As you will see, we embedded novel words and pairs of actions into the story. Children were asked to watch the story and figure out the meanings of the novel words by using syntactic bootstrapping. Then, children had to retain the meanings until the end of the story! Results showed that typically developing children can do this task relatively well, but children with SLI find the task extremely difficult.
That’s syntactic bootstrapping!
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