Responding by exclusion in Late Talking Toddlers

Author(s)

Julia Fonseca

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2016-06-03

Examining board members

Andreia Schmidt; Aline Roberta Aceituno da Costa; Camila Domeniconi

• Advisor: Andreia Schmidt

Abstract

Children with language delay are usually identified by the age of two years old, and are appointed by their smaller vocabulary than peers of the same age, although without any underlying pathology. Tasks of responding by exclusion and contextual cue have been reported in the literature as resources to study the possible difficulties present in the verbal repertoire of children with language delay. Two studies were developed to explore the performance of this population in these tasks: the first tested the responding by exclusion of children in matching-to-sample tasks for the teaching of audio-visual conditional discriminations with names and pictures of objects. The second also used matching-tosample tasks and assessed the responding by exclusion at probes with auditory stimuli with topography of nouns and verbs in gerund, using as stimuli comparison videos of actions and images of static objects. The participants were 64 children, 32 with typical development and 32 with language delay, ages 3 and 4 years-old. These studies had as general objectives: a) to investigate the occurrence of responding by exclusion in objectname relations in children with language delay indications compared with children with typical development, and b) to verify the interference of contextual cues in responding by exclusion, using stimuli with topography of nouns and verbs. The results in both studies indicate that children with normal development and language delay can display responding by exclusion consistently since a baseline procedure ensures learning the task. The results of the second study, however, indicate that both groups exhibited a sudden decrease in their performances in tasks of responding under the control of lexical cue. Differences were found during the acquisition of baseline verbs, in which the typically developed children presented a significantly better performance than children with language delay. Significant differences were also found comparing ages: between children of 3 and 4 years old from the same group, and amid 3 year-old-children from different groups, but the same was not found in relation to the participants of 4 years from different groups. These findings indicate that language delay did not affect the responding by exclusion, even with different lexical classes stimuli. In addition, baseline training with nouns and verbs was not sufficient to establish two classes of effective stimuli and to maintain a responding performance as robust as the exclusion probes phase for all children. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/21770-1 - Responding by exclusion in children with language delay
• Grantee: Julia Fonseca
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master