Have you ever known someone with a language impairment? If so, provide some background information about this individual, and describe his/her linguistic behaviour. What sorts of efforts were made to alleviate her/his difficulties? Were they effective?
My wife and I fostered a sibling pair of children, aged 5 and 7 at the time of their arrival, for 12 months. The children were 'semi-feral' in language, cognition and behaviour as a result of extreme neglect - including deprivation of adult interaction, nutrition, and safety - during their critical period, during which they lived in a high-risk environment of drug abuse.
Note here that I use the word 'feral' to indicate children that have severely diminished social capacity as a result of environment rather than biological impairment, and not in the sense of children 'raised in the wild'.
The children had not developed a recognisable complete first-language as they entered into our care - that is, they could not speak Australian English (or any other language) and certainly could not read or write. They communicated with each other in their own form of pidgin comprised largely of soft vowel sounds and a limited range of distorted, 'lazy' consonants, some of which approximated English. They were almost completely unable to communicate effectively with others, however some adults who engaged with them over time (e.g. case workers, individual school teachers) could communicate with them through the use of massive repetition and restatement, and mime and gestures.
Both children exhibited primitive ('animal') behaviour, especially when afraid or confused, and the older child would physically attack when challenged, or at the perception of any challenge.
My wife and I worked for 2 - 3 hours a day with each child individually, and later together, using regression techniques and then working from a 'baby state' to establish phonetics, first-50 and then first-100 words, initially in speech, then reading, and later in writing. We actively used 'parentese' from the outset, using recasting techniques to model correct vocabulary and syntax, and the children responded almost immediately, and then exponentially. Approximately 9 months into the placement we sought professional speech therapy to address specific issues that we were unable to address in a home setting, and the children 'normalised' to the degree that they were capable given their history.
However, many of the classic syntactical issues explored in the text remained inherent, and resisted training, for example:
Boy: *Her did it, isn't she (casting blame on his sister)
Girl: *Dat Hoh-heh (pointing out the cat, Moses)
and we were confident that at the higher-level, demonstrated improvements in performance were 'practiced' in the sense of being rehearsed and performed for reward (in the form of acknowledgement and attention from carers) and that the children would revert to their own pidgin language if given the opportunity.
We had occasion to meet the children immediately after the end of their placement with us, and then at three months and six months (purely by chance) and were dismayed to discover that in the absence of concerted effort by carers, the children lapsed back into their own language, marginally at first and then at an accelerated rate, to the degree that they were no longer comprehensible to an untrained ear.
To me, this supports the notion of the 'critical period' in FLA and the nature of hard-coding that occurs to middle-childhood, and that attempts to retrain or extend learning beyond that time may be 'in resistance to' earliest learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment