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Kinderen met een taalontwikkelingsstoornis (TOS) hebben taalproblemen zonder dat hier een duidelijk aanwijsbare oorzaak voor is. Hoewel er over de oorzaak nog veel onduidelijkheid bestaat, is er wel veel bekend over de manier waarop de stoornis zich uit in de taal van deze kinderen. Bij kinderen met het 22q11.2 deletiesyndroom (22q11DS) is dit andersom. Ook zij hebben zwakke taalvaardigheden, die los lijken te staan van andere symptomen die bij het syndroom horen, maar er is tot op heden weinig onderzoek gedaan naar het taalprofiel van deze kinderen. De oorzaak is echter wel bekend: het ontbreken van een stukje genetisch materiaal. Door TOS en 22q11DS met elkaar te vergelijken kan meer duidelijk worden over de etiologie van TOS en over het taalprofiel van kinderen met 22q11DS. Dit kan van nut zijn voor het stellen van diagnoses en het kiezen en ontwikkelen van interventies. In de huidige studie wordt onderzocht in hoeverre de taalprofielen van kinderen met TOS en 22q11DS overeenkomen op het gebied van werkwoordinflectie, en hoe deze taalprofielen zich verhouden ten opzichte van typisch ontwikkelende kinderen. Om dit te onderzoeken is de spontane spraak van deze drie groepen onderzocht, waarbij elke groep gerepresenteerd werd door tien participanten tussen de 5 en 7 jaar oud. Er is gekeken hoeveel en wat voor type fouten de kinderen maakten. Uit de resultaten bleek dat de kinderen met TOS en 22q11DS meer inflectiefouten maakten dan de typisch ontwikkelende kinderen, en dat het soort inflectiefouten wat door hen gemaakt werd grotendeels overeenkomt. Dit bevestigt de verwachting dat de taalprofielen van deze groepen kinderen gemeenschappelijkheid kennen, wat aanleiding geeft tot het verder onderzoeken van de gemeenschappelijkheid van TOS en 22q11DS, bijvoorbeeld in de route van genotype naar fenotype. Ook kan deze gemeenschappelijkheid van belang zijn voor het ontwikkelen van taaltherapie voor kinderen met 22q11DS. Deze studie is echter beperkt, met name omdat de groep

The 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q11DS) is characterized by large phenotypic variation, but research suggests that the language development of children with 22q11DS is commonly delayed compared to typically developing (TD) children. However, little is known about the developmental language trajectories of children with 22q11DS. The aim of the current study is to investigate whether the language proficiency of pre-schoolers with 22q11DS develops differently compared to TD children by administering and analysing the standardized language measures (comprising different language domains) of children with 22q11DS aged 3;0-6;6 years old on two time points (six months apart). The children’s scores were compared with a matched TD group at the first test moment, and with norm scores at both test moments. The results showed that children with 22q11DS have an overall lower language proficiency than their peers. Children with 22q11DS showed improvement for both receptive and expressive vocabulary and for sentence comprehension between T1 and T2. Furthermore, age corrected norm scores did not differ between T1 and T2, indicating that children with 22q11DS develop at a comparable rate as their TD peers on all subdomains. Exploratory analyses suggest that children with 22q11DS have more difficulty keeping up with the developmental pace of the norm group for expressive, than for receptive language skills. These findings indicate that developmental language trajectory is language domain dependent in this population. It is recommended to start speech-language therapy at a young age for children with 22q11DS and to monitor their language development throughout childhood.

It has been widely reported that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are outperformed by their TD peers regarding their abilities to repeat nonwords. The poor nonword repetition of children with DLD has been suggested to reflect limitations in phonological short-term memory (pSTM), a memory system in which verbal material can temporarily be stored. However, it is unclear whether their problems with repeating nonwords are situated at the level of retaining items (i.e. phonological characteristics), order (i.e. the phonemes’ position), or both. The present paper aimed to address this question, to gain more insight in the kind of retention problems that children with DLD experience, which is relevant for clinical purposes. Additionally, insight in the error patterns is theoretically of interest, as it sheds light on the question whether children with DLD differ from their TD peers by a delay or a deviance. In total 39 Dutch children with TD and 39 Dutch children with DLD participated in a nonword repetition task (NWRT) at 72 and 95 months of age. The children were matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Their nonword repetitions were analysed in terms of accuracy, and error patterns. Results revealed that with increasing age the groups improved at the same pace, but at both ages the DLD group was outperformed by the TD group. Error patterns did not change with age. Although children with DLD made relatively more combined errors, the overall error profiles of the two groups were largely the same: Item errors were most frequent, followed by combined errors, which were in turn followed by order errors. These findings suggest that the retention problems of children with DLD are similar to the retention problems of their TD peers, but that the problems of the DLD group are more severe. Retention problems were mainly situated at the level of item information, and to a lesser extent at the level of order information.

Background: Morphology is often seen as a clinical marker (i.e. a characteristic point of difficulty) of Development Language Disorder (DLD) in monolingual children. Previous studies have reported overlap in the difficulties bilingual TD (Typical Development) children and monolingual children with DLD have with morphology. As a result, it is uncertain whether morphology can be used to help identify DLD in bilingual children. Aim: The aim of this thesis is to identify the effects of DLD and bilingualism on the development of the morphological error patterns of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with and without a Developmental Language Disorder. Method: Longitudinal data of Dutch monolingual and bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with and without DLD (n = 10 per group) between the ages of 5 to 7 years was collected during three yearly sessions. At each session, children’s spontaneous language was recorded during a semi-structured interview and narrative task. For each child, the morphological errors in verb inflection, determiners, adjectives, plural nouns and prepositions were coded based on error types (i.e. substitution, omission or other errors). Results: The absolute error numbers showed that the children with DLD were more likely than TD children to make omission errors rather than substitution errors in each session in the verb inflection and the noun phrase feature categories. However, this difference between TD and DLD were only consistently significant in the verb inflection category. The omissions to total errors proportions showed a number of longitudinal effects. There was a significant effect of bilingualism in children with DLD and a significant effect of DLD in bilingual children. The bilingual children with DLD had a larger decrease in omission proportions than the monolingual children with DLD over the course of the experiment. However, the bilingual group with DLD had consistently higher omission proportions than the bilingual TD

Title: Grammatical complexity and accuracy of Dutch school-age children with 22q11DS and children with DLD. Background: Almost all children with the 22q11.2 microdeletion syndrome (22q11DS) are delayed in language milestones and language continues to develop slowly. It is evident that these children experience persistent language difficulties, however linguistically informed descriptions of the profile of language impairment are scarce. Moreover, the language delay does not seem directly related to a mental or physical handicap, hearing loss, emotional disorder or environmental deprivation, and therefore some children with 22q11DS receive a diagnosis of DLD. Aim: In the current study, the grammatical performance of children with 22q11DS was analyzed and compared to age-related peers with DLD. Method: In a cross-sectional, observational pilot study design, 14 children with 22q11DS and 15 children with DLD, aged 6 to 10 years, performed a conversation and picture narrative task. Their elicited language was analyzed on six outcome variables, including Mean Length of Utterance in words (MLU-word), Mean Length of Five Longest Utterances (MLU5-word), and four verb-related measures: subject-verb agreement errors, past tense marker errors, dummy auxiliaries and other verb-related errors. Group differences were analyzed. Results: There were no significant differences between the grammatical complexity and accuracy measures of children with 22q11DS and children with DLD. Conclusion: The current study found no evidence of a difference in the performance of children with 22q11DS and children with DLD across grammatical complexity and accuracy measures. Recommendations: Speech-language therapists should be cautious in diagnosing children with persistent (grammatical) language delays as DLD using a language assessment only since these could be undiagnosed cases of 22q11DS. It is recommended to refer these children to a multidisciplinary team to evaluate the presence of co-occurri

The present study discusses the difficulties that children with a language impairment can have with the verbal expression of their emotions as this is often observed but has never been examined. A literature review will give important background on the characteristics of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and on research within the field of emotions, in particular concerning the verbalization of emotions. The exploratory research that follows will bring these two topics together. Two groups of children with a language disorder were studied, differing with respect to whether they could verbalize their emotions. The two groups were compared on many variables, including, most importantly, language profile, social contact and the suspicion of an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The results showed that the group with children that had difficulties with the verbalization of emotions was more pragmatically impaired and had poorer social contact compared to the group with children that did not have difficulties with the verbalization of emotions. Moreover, many children that had problems with the verbal expression of their emotions showed features that led professionals working with the children to suspect ASD. These results led to the prediction that children with SLI that have difficulties with the verbalization of their emotions will have a broad range of problems, including social-emotional and behavioural difficulties. Implications for the relation between SLI and ASD are discussed as well as suggestions for future research.