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Contact: Joy Simpson, Schiefelbusch Life Span Institute, (785) 864-4804.

KU researcher develops test to diagnose language disability

LAWRENCE -- "Yesterday she walk to my house." In a 5-year-old child, failure to use the past tense is one indication of a condition called Specific Language Impairment, or SLI, a disability that likely would go undiagnosed by traditional language testing.

But now a University of Kansas faculty member is one of two scientists who developed the first diagnostic test designed specifically for the significant learning and communication disability.

Mabel Rice, director of the Child Language Doctoral Program and distinguished professor of speech-language-hearing at KU, and Kenneth Wexler, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have developed the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. The test is designed to diagnose children ages 3 through 8 and can be administered by clinicians within an hour using books and toys.

Based on years of research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the test identifies disabilities that are often overlooked but that pose barriers to learning and communication through adulthood. Specific Language Impairment affects approximately 7.6 percent of 5-year-olds.

"In the early years, it is easy to dismiss the condition as baby talk, but in kindergarten, a child with SLI clearly does not have mastery of language," Rice said.

Even then, a child may not be referred for extra help because traditional tests are not designed with this unique impairment in mind.

It is difficult to pinpoint SLI. In many ways, the child speaks accurately and does not fall neatly into the category of a late talker, according to Rice. "Certain patterns in her grammar mark the impairment," Rice explained.

For example, a child will frequently drop "do" and "be" from verb phrases. Instead of asking "Does he like me?" she will ask "He like me?" The past tense of verbs also may be dropped, especially "-ed."

"Waiting for children to outgrow this pattern is not helpful because it involves more than just a delay in their development," Rice said. "In fact, it may have a genetic cause."

Rice looks for a genetic link in SLI through studies of twins and families.

SLI is a disorder that scientists are just beginning to understand, with the first significant research emerging in the 1980s.

Children with SLI have normal intelligence and do not suffer from hearing loss, emotional problems or neurological impairments. Only a small number of children have difficulty with articulation. But an altered sense of language can hinder learning and reading as the child grows. Rice also believes that SLI results in low-level language performance in adulthood.

"Early diagnosis and treatment are critical for future success," she said.

Rice has one of the broadest experiences with children and language disorders in the United States. Her team of researchers has been traveling across Kansas for nine years interviewing children as they reach age 3 and returning periodically to test the children's progress through their 8th year. This research will be extended to track the same children to age 13, making it one of only two SLI projects in the nation that can draw upon years of data from the same population. The broad scope of this study has allowed researchers to decode the sentence structures of children affected by SLI.

The test is available through the Psychological Corp. in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, see www.psychcorp.com/catalogs/sla/slaf011atpc.htm.

The Child Language Doctoral Program is one of more than 100 programs in KU's Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, which serves rural and urban Kansans through research-based solutions to the problems of human development and disability.