In dit themanummer is tot nu toe vooral gekeken naar de diagnostiek van spraakontwikkelingsstoornissen. In dit artikel worden de mogelijkheden voor behandeling besproken. Na procesdiagnostiek, gekoppeld aan het model van Terband en gebaseerd op het schema van Levelt, volgt een logopedische diagnose die richting geeft aan de therapie. Elke logopedische diagnose vraagt een andere insteek en behandeling, met aandacht voor de problematiek van het betreffende kind. De verschillende therapiemethoden en behandelprogramma’s die op dit moment beschikbaar zijn voor het Nederlands worden besproken, gerangschikt naar de problemen waarvoor ze zijn ontwikkeld. Principes en opbouw worden beschreven, alsmede de beschikbare evidentie.
Category fluency tasks involve producing words constrained by a semantic field (animals). Subcategory fluency involves producing words from categories that are semantically related to a superordinate category but form a restricted set of items (farm animals). Here, we study whether people produce different patterns of words in category versus subcategory fluency by looking at differences in the total number of words produced, the properties of the words produced (e.g., frequency) and how people group words together (clusters/switches and network metrics). Forty-eight Dutch-speaking university students responded to three category fluency tasks (animals, foods, transport) and three subcategory fluency tasks (farm animals, fruits, bike parts). Also, we queried a large language model (LLM) to provide responses for 50 “pseudo-participants” for the same six categories. People in category (versus subcategory) tasks produced more words; words of higher frequency, with fewer orthographic and phonological neighbors, and shorter in length. They also produced fewer cluster switches and bigger clusters. The category and subcategory networks had different structure (e.g., number of nodes, edges, clustering coefficient). With the LLM we simulated the results regarding word properties and cluster size, but found differences regarding correct words, number of switches, and overlapping clusters between foods and fruit fluency. The differences between category and subcategory fluency may stem from differences in mental search in the lexico-semantic system. However, category and subcategory fluency tasks may be different tasks altogether. The LLM simulation provides novel insights (e.g., how words relate, task-order effects) and suggests caution when used to understand human fluency data.
This paper reports upon an evaluation of a school-based screening program aimed at detecting psychological problems1 in 495 deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students. The first aim of the study was to evaluate the actual implementation of this program. Furthermore, the prevalence of internalizing and externalizing problems in a subset of 277 DHH students was analysed and subsequently how these problems vary as a function of age, gender, context, and negative life circumstances (NLCs). The results show higher prevalence rates of psychological problems compared to typical hearing peers, but lower than in previous studies. More problems were observed in the context of school than at home. No age or gender differences were found, but significantly more internalizing problems in DHH adolescents than externalizing problems. Prevalence of psychological problems among DHH students without NLCs were significantly lower than among students with one or more NLCs. The results shows a screening program to identify psychological problems in special schools can be successfully implemented. Such programs will help to identify psychological problems at an early stage and provide care for DHH children and adolescents with psychological problems.
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience problems in language comprehension and/or production. In particular, storytelling or narrative ability is often impaired, as this type of discourse involves all domains of language. These problems may lead to a lower quality of social interaction and mental health. Moreover, problems in oral narrative ability during early development have a negative effect on later literacy. However, telling a story involves more than language alone. Executive functioning is thought to play an important part in stimulating narrative ability, as linguistic utterances need to be planned in a temporal and causal order, and switching is needed between multiple characters and events in the story. Research has shown that children with DLD experience problems with executive functioning, independent of their language ability. Thus, the difficulties in storytelling may be caused by both impaired language and executive functioning, as both domains follow hierarchical developmental paths during the early childhood years. In this review, we discuss three components of narrative ability (comprehension, production of macrostructure and production of microstructure) and how they may be interconnected to the three core components of executive functioning (working memory, switching and inhibition) and attention. This review shows that updating and monitoring information in working memory plays an important part in all three components of narrative ability, across multiple studies. This result may give direction in the development of narrative assessment and intervention, and urge further research to disentangle the interplay between language and executive control in DLD.
