CHILDES Clinical English Conti-Ramsden Corpus 3

Gina Conti-Ramsden Human Communication and Deafness The University of Manchester gina.conti-ramsden@manchester.ac.uk

Ludovica Serratrice LUCID The University of Reading l.serratrice@reading.ac.uk website

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Citation information

Joseph, K. L., Serratrice, L. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (2002). Development of copula and auxiliary BE in children with Specific Language Impairment and younger unaffected controls. First Language, 22, 137-172.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by the above reference.

Additional references:

Berument, S.K., Rutter, M., Lord, C., Pickles A., & Bailey, A. (1999). Autistic Screening Questionnaire: Diagnostic Validity. British Journal of Psychiatry, 175, 444-451.

Dunn, L.M., Dunn, L.M., Whetton, C. & Pintillie, D. (1982). The British Picture Vocabu-lary Scale. Windsor: NFER.

Edwards, S., Fletcher, P., Garman, M., Hughes, A., Letts, C. & Sinka, I. (1997). The Rey-nell Developmental Language Scale III: the University of Reading Edition. Windsor: NFER.

Fenson, L., Dale, P.S., Reznick, J.S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J., Pethick, S., Reilly, J. (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: user’s guide and technical manual. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group.

Gathercole, S.E. & Baddeley, A.D. (1996) The Children’s Test of Nonword Repetition. London: The Psychological Corporation.

Leiter, R.G. (1969). The Leiter International Performance Scale. Chicago, IL: Stoelting.

Williams, K. (1997). The Expressive Vocabulary Test. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Services.

Wiig, E.H., Secord, W & Semel, E. (1992). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamen-tals-Preschool. New York, NY: The Psychological Corporation.

Project Description

This corpus includes longitudinal data from four monolingual British children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) ranging from 2;6 to 4;0 at the beginning of the study and from 3;11 and 5;0 at the end of the study. Rachel Hick and Kate Joseph conducted data collection and analysis.

Participants

The four children in this study, one girl and three boys, were recruited through a number of speech and language therapists in the North West of England. The therapists were initially informed by letter of the criteria for participation including the following: age range between 2;6 and 4;0, early stages of multiword speech, no history of hearing problems, good degree of intelligibility, non-verbal abilities within the normal range, no obvious autistic tendencies, poor language abilities including poor receptive abilities. Parents of children meeting these criteria were subsequently contacted and visited at home by two researchers. In the initial screening visit one of the investigators explained the aims and methods of the study to the parents and helped them fill in an anglicised copy of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory Words and Sentences (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Thal, Bates, Hartung, Pethick, Reilly, 1993) to assess the child’s lexical skills and his/her productive use of multiword utterances. The parents were also asked to complete a questionnaire including information on parental education and occupation, number of siblings, pregnancy and birth history, family history of speech and language impairment, learning difficulties and mental retardation, and child’s previous ear infections and hearing problems. The Autistic Screening Questionnaire (Berument, Rutter, Lord, Pickles & Bailey, 1999) was also administered to ensure that the children did not have any obvious autistic tendencies. During the initial visit a twenty minute spontaneous speech sample was also obtained while one of the investigators played with the child and administered the receptive component of the Reynell developmental language scales (Edwards, Fletcher, Garman, Hughes, Letts & Sinka, 1997). In order to be enrolled in the study the children had to present receptive as well as expressive difficulties and only children below the 16th centile were therefore included. A measure of non-verbal ability was also elicited using the Leiter International Performance Scale (Leiter, 1969) to ensure that the children were within the normal range.

Once the children were identified as potential participants in the study the parents were required to sign a consent form in which they agreed to take part in the study with their children for a period of up to 18 months.

The following table provides information on children’s age, sex, birth order, MLU in words at the start of the study, Reynell receptive centile, and non-verbal I.Q..

Conti-Ramsden 3 Children

Child	Sex	Birth	Age	MLUw	Reynell	I.Q.
Bonnie	F	1	4;0	2.85	1	90
Dan	M	2	2;6	1.06	10	129
Harry	M	1	3;4	1.78	13	120
Nathan	M	2	2;10	1.23	1	117

At the start of the study all the children were attending mainstream nursery schools and were either receiving speech and language therapy or had received it in the previous six months. By the end of the data collection period two of the children, Bonnie and Harry, were enrolled in mainstream primary schools and Bonnie had the support of a teaching assistant.

Data collection

Data were collected for a period of sixteen months at fortnightly intervals in the children’s homes with breaks due to illness and family commitments. One of the children originally recruited in the study was excluded after three months due to difficulties in keeping up with the recording schedule. Bonnie replaced the child who was withdrawn four months into the project therefore data collection only lasted twelve months for this child.

Each session lasted for approximately an hour and it involved the child and the mother playing together in a quiet room. Older siblings were occasionally present during the recordings with Harry and Nathan, and Bonnie’s newborn brother was also in the room in most of the recordings. The investigator was not normally present during the recordings with Dan and Harry, except when the mother had to leave the room or at the beginning and at the end of a session in order to deal with the equipment. In the case of Bonnie and Nathan the investigator spent longer periods of time with the children while the mother was otherwise engaged, especially from session sixteen onwards in Bonnie’s recordings. The activities the children engaged in during the recordings ranged from looking at picture books to playing with toy trains, drawing, playing with Lego. The investigators also provided a set of toys including miniature Playmobil people and a variety of assembly sets such as a café, a log cabin with fishing boats, a farmyard, a playground and a furnished house. The new toys were quite successful in engaging the children’s attention and in generating a considerable amount of speech with their mothers and the investigator. In the last three months of the study the investigators supplied three different story books with a clear sequential narrative in the attempt to elicit more complex structures and longer mother-child exchanges.

All sessions were audiotaped using a portable Sony digital minidisc recorder MZ-R35 and an ATR97 omnidirectional boundary microphone placed on a flat surface near the re-corder. At monthly intervals the sessions were also videotaped using a Panasonic VHS-C camera installed on a tripod.

In addition to collecting spontaneous data of mother-child interaction a number of psychometric tests were also administered to assess children’s receptive and expressive lexical and grammatical abilities: the British Picture Vocabulary Scales (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Pintillie, 1982), the Expressive Vocabulary Test (Williams, 1997), the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool (Wiig, Secord & Semel, 1992), the Children’s Test of Non-word Repetition (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1996). All tests were conducted in a quiet room by one of the female investigators, mothers were not normally present unless the child was particularly distressed or unwilling to co-operate. All of the tests were repeated once after a minimal interval of six months.

Conti-Ramsden 3 Test Scores

	Bonnie	Dan	Harry	Nathan
Test	Age	Cent	Age	Cent	Age	Cent	Age	Cent
BPVS	4;1	30	3;1	58	3;9	34	3;4	55
CELF	4;3	7	3;9	53	3;10	45	3;4	47
Linguistic concepts		1		75		75		63
Basic concepts		1		75		37		63
Sentence structure		5		50		75		95
Receptive language		1		70		66		82
Recalling sentences		5		16		25		16
Formulating labels		5		75		50		37
Word structure		1		25		9		5
Expressive language		2		34		21		16
CN-REP	4;10	11-15	3;11	50	4;7	25-50		25
EVT	4;3	21	3;3	47	3;10	61		68

Transcription and coding

The spontaneous data were orthographically transcribed in CHAT format by the three trained researchers who originally collected the samples. Pauses, hesitations, interruptions, overlaps and retracings were also coded as accurately as possible. All names, except the investigators’, were changed to preserve anonymity.

Postcodes were introduced for tagging self-repetitions [+ srp] and imitations [+ imi] of an immediately preceding utterance and non-lexical responses [+ nlr]. The first two codes were used only for utterances containing a minimum of two words and for those ut-terances that were an exact repetition of the immediately preceding utterance used by the speaker or identical to an immediately preceding utterance used by another speaker. The [+ nlr] code was used whenever the child attempted a verbal response but it was of a non-lexical nature, i.e. a vocalization, although not a recognizable word, that was obviously a response to a previous maternal turn.