Early Language Development
You have been asked to give a workshop to a group of parents of infants who attend a developmental nursery. The parents are interested in what they can do to communicate more successfully with their infants. Most of the infants are between 1 and 10 months of age. Most of the parents do not have much money or access to toys and objects, but you are told that they do spend plenty of time with their babies. You are asked to speak about what specifically these parents can do to successfully interact with their infants in daily routines, such as bathing, dressing, and eating. You will tell these parents which of the following?
A. When babies start to cry, let them do so for 5-10 minutes before you respond; this will teach babies independence and motivate them to express themselves in words later on (instead of crying)
B. Ideally, speak to the baby in utterances (child-directed speech) that are higher pitched and have greater pitch fluctuations than ordinary speech.
C. Babies do not benefit from activities used to build turn-taking skills until they are 2 years old, so do not bother with games that focus on turn taking.
D. Babies do not usually say their first word until 18 months of age, so do not worry if your child is 12 months old and not saying any words.
B. Ideally, speak to the baby in utterances (child-directed speech) that are higher pitched and have greater pitch fluctuations than ordinary speech
A child says, "Red crayon." This is an example of which type of semantic relations?
A. Attribute + entity
B. Action + locative
C. Agent + action
D. Attribute + locative
A . When a child says, "Red crayon" this is an example of attribute + entity
You are conducting an assessment with an incoming kindergartener, Jason E., who has difficulty with word endings. Specifically, he tends to omit endings like -est (saying "sad" instead of "saddest"), -ily (saying "angry" instead of "angrily"), and so forth. He is having difficulty with which specific aspect of language?
A. Syntax
B. Pragmatics
C. Semantics
D. Morphology
D. Jason is having difficulty with morphology, because he is deleting bound morphemes from the ends of words.
You observe a clinician working with a child who has a language impairment. They are making cookies together, and the clinician is saying things like "Look, the dough goes in the bowl; the spoon is beside the bowl. We will set the bowl on top of the counter, and then make the cookies." The clinician is working on developing the child's skill in the area of understanding:
A. indirect requests
B. locatives
C. pragmatics
D. gerunds
B. The clinician is working on increasing the child's skill in using locatives; she is saying and physically demonstrating locatives, such as on top, in, beside.
A first-grade teacher refers 6-year-old Mandy to you for an assessment. The teacher is concerned because Mandy has problems remembering what she hears, particularly when given three or four directions quickly. Based on this brief description, you suspect that Mandy might have difficulties in which area?
A. Temporal auditory processing
B. Divergent semantic production
C. Phonological processing
D. Convergent semantic production
A. Mandy's difficulties with remembering directions probably indicate problems with temporal auditory processing
A mother comes to you, concerned because her son Jake was born prematurely and had to spend the first few months of his life in a neonatal intensive care unit. Now Jake is 9 months old, and his mother wants to make sure that his language development is "on target for his age." You go to Jake's home to observe him, and you also ask his mother to give you a detailed description of his communication patterns. As you evaluate Jake's language development, you need to remember that one of the following does NOT occur between 8 and 10 months of age in the typically developing child. Which one is it?
A. Comprehension of no
B. Using the phrase "all gone" to express emerging negation
C. Using variegated babbling (e.g., "madamada")
D. Uncovering a hidden toy (beginning of object permanence)
B. Most children use "all gone" to express emerging negation between 1 and 2 years of age.
A child using recurrence would say which of the following?
A. "Face dirty"
B. "All gone juice"
C. "More cookie"
D. "Doll mine"
C. A child using recurrence would say, "More cookie."
You are asked to work with a 3-and-a-half-year-old child whose language has been somewhat slow to develop. Matthew is the youngest of four children, and his parents tell you that his older siblings often talk for him. After assessing Matthew's language, you find that he consistently uses the following morphemes: present progressive -ing, prepositions in and on, and regular plural -s. His parents would like to enroll him for therapy because they want him to go to a local preschool, and they want him to "sound like the other kids and have good grammar." Which of the following morphemes would you begin with when Matthew starts therapy?
A. Possessive -S
B. Irregular past-tense verbs
C. Articles the, a, an
D. Contractible auxiliary
B. According to Brown's list of morphemes, irregular past-tense verbs would be next to develop; thus this would be a good starting point for therapy
A 7-year-old girl, Ashton, is referred to you by her second-grade classroom teacher. Ashton has difficulty in conversational exchanges with her peers, and they frequently ignore her. In therapy, your first priority with Ashton will be to:
A. teach her the appropriate use of compound and complex sentences in appropriate contexts
B. teach her the appropriate use of allomorphs
C. increase her skills in quick incidental learning
D. increase her skills in discourse
D. Based on your observations and the teacher's report, your first priority in therapy will be to work on Ashton's discourse skills, or skills in the give-and-take of conversation
You observe a clinician who has a well-structured reward system for each child. Some children receive a fruit loop for each correct response; others earn stickers or small toys. The clinician has written down each specific behavior he wishes to elicit, with a percentage of accuracy attached. This clinician probably subscribes to which theory of child language development?
A. Information processing
B. Behaviorist
C. Social interactionist
D. Government binding
B. This clinician bases his therapy on the behaviorist theory, which promotes the concept of stimulus, response, and reinforcement of behaviors that are observable and measurable.
Which one of the following Piagetian stages, which include object permanence, corresponds with the emergence of a typically developing child's first word?
A. Preoperational
B. Formal operations
C. Sensorimotor
D. Concrete operations
C. Children usually use their first word between 10 and 14 months of age, which corresponds to the sensorimotor cognitive development stage
A young child who says "down" when a cup of juice spills off of the dinner table is using the relation of:
A. action
B. possession
C. locative action
D. attribution
C. When the cup of juice spills off the dinner table and the child says " down," she is using the relation of locative action.
A 5-year-old child has been referred to you for a language assessment. There is a concern about his expressive language skills, and you decide to gather a language sample to assess expressive morphology and syntax. At one point, when looking at a book, the child points to a book character and says, "Him no eat cookies." This is an example of:
A. four words, five morphemes, personal pronoun + one negative + one verb + one plural noun
B. four words, six morphemes, modal + one negative + one verb + one auxiliary
C. four words, four morphemes, personal pronoun + one copula + one negative + one noun
D. four words, five morphemes, negative + one personal pronoun + one copula
A. If you are conducting a language sample with a 5-year-old and the child says, "Him no eat cookies," this is an example of four words, five morphemes, personal pronoun + one negative + one verb + one plural noun
Brian is a speech-language pathologist at a middle school. He asks seventh-grader Erin about her summer vacation. She tells him: "We went to Disneyland, and it was awesome. Thunder Mountain was my favorite ride. My cat has to go to the vet because she keeps throwing up. I hope she'll be OK. My big brother just went off to college." Brian can most accurately conclude that Erin has specific difficulties with:
A. grammatical ellipsis
B. pronoun elision
C. announcing topic shifts
D. expressive morphosyntactic skills
C. Erin is displaying specific difficulty with announcing topic shifts. She indeed changes topics quickly and abruptly without telling the listener that she is discussing a different subject now.
A fourth-grade child, Alex, has been referred to you for language testing by his teacher. His parents are concerned and upset with the teacher because they feel that Alex needs more help in reading and writing skills than he is receiving. They tell you that the math and science homework assignments are too difficult for him, and they feel that the fourth-grade teacher is making unreasonable demands. You find out that Alex did not attend preschool, and even in kindergarten, the teacher wrote on his first-trimester progress report that he "began school not knowing basic concepts; he didn't talk as much as the other children either." You will tell Alex's parents that:
A. the teacher really is being unreasonable and demanding too much
B. Alex definitely has a language delay and needs therapy
C. you would like to conduct an assessment of Alex's language skills in a variety of domains to see whether he needs support services in oral and written language
D. Alex definitely needs a psychological evaluation to see if he has an intellectual disability
C. You tell the parents that you would like to conduct an assessment of Alex's language skills in a variety of domains to see whether he needs support services in oral and written language. It is important for you to evaluate Alex's language skills to see if he needs intervention, because there are several red flags, such as his difficulties that began in kindergarten and his struggles with the fourth-grade curriculum
In order to begin producing two-word combinations, how many words do toddlers need to have in their expressive vocabulary?
A. 50
B. 20
C. 100
D. 10
A. In order to begin putting two words together, a toddler must have at least 50 words in his expressive vocabulary.
A young child who often says things like "my doggy" or "their ball" is using the relation of:
A. recurrence
B. possession
C. location
D. denial
B. Utterances such as "my doggy" and "her ball" represent the relation of possession
An example of a sentence using an embedded form would be which of the following?
A. "The boy who got a haircut looks nice"
B. The girl ate a cookie, three crackers, and some fruit
C. Mom and Dad are going to the store to buy some groceries.
D. Because he was on time, they were happy with him.
A. Embedding refers to adding or rearranging elements within sentences; in this example the phrase "who got a haircut" makes the sentence one that uses an embedded form.
A child has been referred to you for an assessment of his pragmatic skills. Adults and children report that he frequently gives commands and sounds rude and bossy. His father would like intervention to help his son say things like "I wonder if we could get a Spiderman DVD at the store," instead of giving orders. In therapy, you know you will need to work on the boy's facility with:
A. passive sentence transformations
B. cohesion
C. narrative skills
D. indirect requests
D. The ability to say something like "I wonder if we could get a Spiderman DVD at the store" indicates facility with indirect requests
you are asked to assess Tina, who has Down syndrome. She is 4 years 10 months old, and her parents tell you that they wish for her to begin kindergarten in the fall (it is July, and school begins in Septem- ber). You assess Tina's receptive and expressive language skills and find that she has an average MLU of 3.0 and an expressive vocabulary of 350 words. She sustains a topic of conversation about 20% of the time and overregularizes past-tense inflections. You will tell Tina's parents that:
A. Tina's overall language skills are very generally within normal limits for her age
B. Though Tina's language skills are approximately 6 months delayed for her age, she will be able to participate in a regular kindergarten classroom
C. Tina's language skills are generally commensurate with those of a 2- to 3-year-old child and starting kindergarten in the fall would probably be difficult for her
D. Tina's language skills are generally commensurate with those of a 1-year-old
C. According to language development milestones, Tina's language skills are commensurate with those of a 2-3-year-old; in kindergarten, she would be learning along with typically developing children who are 5-6 years of age.
A baby, Juan, is looking at the family cat. His grandma sees him looking at the cat and directs her gaze toward the cat, also. She prepares to comment about the cat. Juan's grandma is:
A. using presupposition
B. following Juan's line of regard
C. intuiting Juan's thoughts about felines
D. preparing to use a holophrase
B. By seeing the baby look at the cat and then looking at the cat as well, Juan's grandma is following his line of regard.
You have been asked to assess the language skills of 6-year-old Jennifer, who has been referred by her classroom teacher. The teacher says that Jennifer "talks in these really short sentences." You conduct an informal language screening and find that she uses many sentences, such as "He has a ball" and "I like Pokémon." She uses few compound or complex sentences. Her parents report that this performance is also typical at home. Your next step would be to:
A. tell the teacher and parents that Jennifer is within normal limits for her age, and that a formal language evaluation is unnecessary.
B. inform the teacher and parents that Jennifer may have autistic-like tendencies and that she needs to be formally evaluated by a team of special educators
C. tell the teacher and parents that you will take a "wait and see" approach
D. tell the teacher and parents that you would like to formally evaluate Jennifer's language skills because at 6 years of age, she should have an average MLU of 6.0-8.0, and her language should approximate the adult model.
D. Based on your screening results, it will be important to conduct a formal, in-depth assessment of Jennifer's language skills. She definitely should be using longer, more complex utterances that approximate the adult model