The role of vocabulary in the listening text comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder
詞彙在粵語語障學童短篇聽覺理解的作用

Biography:

Professor Cheung Hin Tat received his Ph.D. in Child Language Doctoral Program from University of Kansas. He has been investigating a wide range of issues in developmental psycholinguistics, including grammatical acquisition, cognitive and linguistic deficits in children with developmental speech/language disorders and narrative development in ethnic minority children. He has completed the construction of a publicly accessible corpora - Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (TCCM), which holds more than 300 one-hour spontaneous child language samples.

Abstract:

The present study examined the role of vocabulary in the listening text comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder in Hong Kong. Participants were 692 typically developing children (TD) and 53 children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Both groups of children were tested with a standardized test of oral Cantonese, which includes measures on listening comprehension, receptive and expressive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definition and lexical relations. The results from multiple regression analyses revealed that listening comprehension of the TD group was explained by receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, and lexical relationships, which are consistent with current models on text comprehension. However, children of the DLD group mainly relied on their vocabulary knowledge in understanding the text. They did not seem to make good use of their grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, the DLD group appeared to use some strategies that are good for lexical learning/processing but could be a hindrance to their understanding of text when without the support of grammatical knowledge.

Motor and Language Deficits in Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Old Findings and New Perspectives
發展性語言障礙兒童之動作和語言缺損：舊知與新觀

Biography:

Julie Hsinjen Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Her research areas are on children with developmental language disorder and neurodevelopmental disorders with a focus on development. Her recent work has been focused on language and motor skills and brain lateralization of language functions in children with developmental language disorder. She is also a member of the Research Center for Education and Mind Sciences at National Tsing Hua University.

Abstract:

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent difficulties in spoken or other forms of language that cannot be explained by other neurological disabilities or behavioral conditions. Although DLD is, by definition, an isolated developmental disorder that affects only the development of language, mounting evidence has revealed that DLD is associated with motor deficits. In this talk, I will first summarize the major findings of previous research on motor deficits in children with DLD. I will then introduce some recent work in my lab that focused on motor procedural learning and haptic perception in children with DLD. I will present data that show inferior vs. comparable motor procedural learning of children with DLD when their performance on motor procedural learning was tested and compared to typically developing children under different motor and somatosensory demands. I will also present data from another study in which children’s haptic perception was measured directly and evidence of poor haptic perception and associations between haptic perception and language skills were found. I will finish my talk by summarizing findings from these studies and suggesting possible future research directions for investigating language and motor deficits in DLD.

Verbs and information processing are the keys to syntactic assessment intervention in children with developmental language disorder
動詞及訊息處理是發展性語言障礙兒童語法評估與介入之關鍵

Biography:

Dr. Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology at Chung Shan Medical University, Taiwan. Her research interests include children with developmental language disorder, grammatical development, communication and language intervention, and co-speech gesture.

Abstract:

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with syntax, i.e., rules of putting words into sentences in a language. In this presentation, I will share our recent findings of how considerations of verb and information processing could better evaluate and then facilitate syntactic performances in children with DLD.

We analyzed language samples of children with DLD and found that these children’s syntactic performance is greatly affected by verb frequency, i.e., the higher frequency a verb is, the longer or more complex the sentence is. Also, we found that in our parent-coaching intervention for shared book reading, parents increased their use of verbs when reading with their children after weekly including a list of eight verbs in their at-home reading. In addition, our intervention study also revealed that adults’ gesture for a target structure enhanced production accuracy of that structure in children with DLD, because gesture reduced processing load during learning.

In conclusion, clinicians should incorporate effects of verb frequency and information processing into their assessment and intervention planning for better outcomes.

Visual-spatial attention and reading in Chinese
視覺空間注意與中文閱讀

Biography:

Dr. Duo Liu received his Ph.D. in Developmental and Educational Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education and Counselling at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research interests focus on Chinese language and literacy learning and related difficulties.

Abstract:

Visual-spatial attention, namely “attentional processes that select visual stimuli based on their spatial location” (e.g., Vecera & Rizzo, 2003, p 575), has been found to be associated with reading or reading difficulties in alphabetic languages, even when the effects of other predictors, such as phonological processing skills, were controlled. Researchers highlighted the importance of visual skills in Chinese literacy development because of the features of the Chinese writing system. However, the role of visual-spatial attention in Chinese reading has not been well investigated. In this talk, I will report three studies conducted by my research team on this topic. Across these studies, we adopted the visual search or cueing paradigms to measure visual-spatial attention and included various reading measures as outcomes. The findings in these studies supported the importance of visual-spatial attention, goal-directed or top-down attentional orienting in particular, in primary-school Chinese children’s reading development. Future directions in this research area will be discussed.

Comprehension of core grammar in diverse samples of Mandarin-acquiring preschool children with ASD
漢語學前自閉症兒童核心語法理解研究

Biography:

Dr. Yi (Esther) Su is a Professor of Psycholinguistics at Central South University (CSU), China. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from Macquarie University and PhD in Psychology from the Second Xiangya Hospital of CSU. Her research considers language acquisition across languages and etiologies. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation and the National Social Science Fund of China, her lab currently investigates early language development in Mandarin-exposed vs. English-exposed typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder.

Abstract:

Utilizing the Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) paradigm, we investigated comprehension of three core grammatical structures (Subject-Verb-Object word order, grammatical aspect and wh-questions) in diverse samples of Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD. Results showed that children with ASD, though they were delayed in chronological age and expressive language, acquired various grammatical constructions similarly to their typically developing peers. Moreover, Mandarin-acquiring preschoolers with ASD demonstrated similar acquisition patterns of core grammatical structures, as has been reported in previous IPL studies among English-acquiring children with ASD (Naigles & Fein, 2017). These findings suggest that despite radical differences in social abilities and language environment, core grammatical knowledge may remain intact in children with ASD across languages. Furthermore, preserved comprehension in the face of difficulty with linguistic production illustrates the sharp contrast between linguistic competence (governed by the computational system of the language faculty) vs. linguistic performance (impacted by impairments in the sensory-motor and the conceptual-intentional interfaces) in ASD. Finally, the results highlight dissociations between lexical vs. grammatical capacities in children with ASD, since their comprehension of core grammar only requires a minimum threshold of vocabulary. To conclude, this work provides fresh data in favor of the contribution of the language faculty in autistic language acquisition.

Syntactic Awareness Matters: Uncovering Reading Comprehension Difficulties in Hong Kong Chinese-English Bilingual Children
句法意識在香港中英雙語兒童的閱讀理解困難中的重要性

Biography:

Dr. TONG Xiuhong’s research focuses on literacy development in typically developing children and children with reading difficulties as well as Language learning and processing using multiple approaches (e.g., EEG, techniques).

Abstract:

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: 1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC), 2) 18 poor in English-only (PE), 3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB), 4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB), and 5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. These findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntactic awareness by suggesting that L1 syntactic awareness could impede L2 reading comprehension, and that syntactic awareness could serve as an indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1 and L2 among Hong Kong bilingual children.

The impact of anxiety on reading and learning of Chinese dyslexic students
焦慮對中文閱讀障礙學生閱讀和學習的影響

Biography:

Dr. Wang, Li-Chih Angus is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education at National Tsing Hua University. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education and Counselling at The Education University Hong Kong. His primary area of professional activity is the deficient cognitive and linguistic abilities of Chinese dyslexia, mainly in temporal processing. Also, he's interested in the mental health and the school life of this population, such as anxiety, and how these conditions influence their reading and learning.

Abstract:

Most of the past research on students with dyslexia has focused on their difficulties in cognitive and reading-related abilities as well as the impacts of those difficulties on reading and learning. On the contrary, their emotional issues have received surprisingly little attention. However, as shown in the Component Model of Reading, such psychological factors are no less important to learning and reading than cognitive factors and should not be ignored. Therefore, this talk aims to briefly introduce the anxiety status of those with dyslexia in the Chinese context, supplemented by the speaker's research on related topics, hoping to cut into the needs of Chinese students with dyslexia from a different perspective.

What is the role of audiovisual associative learning in Chinese reading?
視聽聯結學習在中文閱讀中的預測作用

Biography:

Xiujie Yang is an Associate Professor in Faculty of Psychology of Beijing Normal University. Her research areas are Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning Difficulties, including Developmental Dyslexia and Developmental Dyscalculia 兒童認知發展與學習困難, 包括發展性閱讀障礙和計算障礙, Parenting and Family Environment in Relation to Children’s Cognitive Development 父母養育和家庭環境等對兒童認知發展的影,Children’s Cognition and Brain Plasticity 兒童認知與腦的可塑性.

Abstract:

Deficits in the orthography-phonology mapping have been examined in children with developmental dyslexia. The skill is traditionally measured with paired associate learning (PAL) tasks. However, whether the deficits are results of cross-modal associative learning problems, or due to phonological processing problems, are under debate. To investigate whether audiovisual cross-modal learning uniquely contributed to reading, the current study examined the audiovisual associative learning abilities, Chinese character reading (accuracy and fluency), nonverbal IQ, and phonological processing skills, including phonological memory, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming (hereafter, RAN). After controlling for the effects of IQ and phonological processing skills, hierarchical regression analyses found that the learning speed of verbal and nonverbal audiovisual cross-modal feedback (hereafter, A-V CFL) could still account for 8.5% of the variance in reading fluency respectively, whereas the error rate of verbal A-V CFL could significantly account for 10.0% and 9.9% of the variances in reading accuracy and reading fluency, respectively. Findings underscore the unique role of the cross-modal associative learning in Chinese reading accuracy and fluency.

Benefits of phonological processing skills related to motor-based speech therapy for preschool children with speech sound disorders
構音動作介入對語音異常幼兒在音韻處理上的治療效益

Biography:

Dr. Yeh, Lili is an Associate Professor in the Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at MacKay Medical College, Taiwan. Her research interests include the role of phonological awareness in Chinese literacy acquisition, the assessment and intervention of childhood speech sound disorders, and the education of clinical skills for speech-language pathologists, such as disordered speech transcription and clinical communication skills. Her recent publication can be found in Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, and Otology and Neurotology.

Abstract:

Phonological awareness has been found to be closely associated to reading acquisition. For preschool children with speech sound disorder (SSD), their phonological processing skills were found to be less well than their typical developing peers. The purpose of the study is to examine whether the severity of childhood SSD was significantly related to their phonological processing skills, such as non-word repetition and phonological awareness of syllable, rime and onset. In addition, the efficacy of traditional motor approach on facilitating phonological processing was also explored. The study recruited 19 children (average age 4; 11) diagnosed as having SSD. Their speech accuracy and phonological processing skills were assessed before and after 10 sessions of speech therapy based on traditional motor approach. More significant correlations among speech accuracy and phonological processing subtasks were found in post testing. The application of the results for speech therapy and special education on reading acquisition will be discussed.

The visual attention span capacity in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia
漢語閱讀障礙兒童的視覺注意廣度技能

Biography:

Dr. Jing Zhao is an Associate Professor at School of Psychology of Capital Normal University in Beijing, who was selected into Youth Talent Lifting Project of China Association for science and technology in 2021. Her research interests include exploring the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading disabilities through behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, with cross-sectional and longitudinal methods; and designing interventions for poor readers based on their special cognitive deficits and to assess relevant remediation effects.

Abstract:

“Taking in ten lines at a glance” as an idiom in Chinese language, is closely related to the ability to simultaneously process the visual forms of several letters/characters, which implicates in a basic cognitive skill, namely visual attention span (VAS). Our research group have systematically examined the VAS capacity of typically developing children and children with developmental dyslexia and its relation to Chinese reading via cross-sectional, longitudinal, and training designs, with the combination of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. Previous findings consistently revealed the important role of this attentional skill in Chinese reading; meanwhile Chinese children with dyslexia exhibited significant VAS deficits, especially with high heterogeneity. Our recent neuroimaging study reported that VAS involved both of the dorsal and ventral attentional networks; meanwhile electrophysiological evidences showed that the VAS deficit in dysfluent readers could be reflected in different stages of temporal processing. The above findings suggested that VAS may implicate in multiple cognitive processes, and therefore it is necessary to further explore the underlying mechanisms of VAS so as to deepen our understanding of the high heterogeneity in the VAS-reading relationship. The theory of visual attention (TVA) proposed by Bundesen (1990) provides us a theory framework to systematically explore the cognitive subcomponents underlying the VAS capacity. In this report, I will introduce our recent studies on VAS of Chinese children with dyslexia within the TVA framework.