Cursus: Taal en Cognitie in Normale en Verstoorde Ontwikkeling
Samenvatting artikelen
Week 1: Modulariteit en Comorbiditeit
Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders (Karmiloff-Smith)
Nativist approach focus on domain-specific cognitive modules. The environment acts as a trigger
for identifying and setting native-tongue realisations of parameters of universal grammar. The child is
born innately expecting nouns, verbs etc., but not yet knowing how they are realised in their native
tongue.
Neuroconstructivist approach seeks more indirect, lower-level causes of abnormality, modules are
thought to emerge from a developmental process of modularisation, it accepts some form of innately
specified starting points, but these are considered to be ‘domain-relevant’, and cognitive disorders
are considered to lie on a continuum rather than to be truly specific.
New perspective: a variety of domain-relevant mechanisms that gradually become domain-specific as
a result of processing different kinds of input.
Two very distinct phenotypical outcomes could start with only slightly different parameters but, with
development, the effects of this small difference might be far reaching. This can explain the range of
phenotypical outcomes that atypical development can display.
Williams Syndrome:
- Brain volume, anatomy, chemistry, hemispheric asymmetry, and temporal patterns of brain
activity are atypical.
- Clinical characteristics: dysmorphic faces, congenital heart and renal disorders, musculo-
skeletal abnormalities, growth retardation, hyperacusis, infantile hypercalaemia ,mental
retardation, spatio-constructive problems, IQs in the 40s, deficits in numerical cognition,
deficits in problem solving and planning.
Important: Box 6 p. 396/397
Procedural learning difficulties: reuniting the developmental disorders? (Nicolson & Fawcett)
Differentiation between ‘core’ symptoms (specific and central to the disorder) and ‘secondary’
symptoms (nonessential and might be shared with other disorders).
Comorbidity overlap between disorders. This is normal, rather than an exception.
Developmental dyslexia unexpected difficulties in learning to read in children of (above-)average
intelligence.
Criticism of the cerebellar-deficit framework:
- The cerebellum is too broad (underspecificity)
- The cerebellum is too narrow (overspecificity)
- The cerebellar deficit is not a core feature of dyslexia (primacy)
Cognitive-level hypothesis: dyslexic children have difficulties in learning skills to the extent that they
become automatic (no longer needing explicit attentive control). Based on three-stage analysis of
skill learning initial declarative stage, intermediate procedural stage, final autonomous stage.
,Five phases of acquisition fast (minutes), slow (hours), consolidation (overnight), automatization
(hundreds of trials), and retention (weeks).
The basal ganglia provide opportunities for reward-based learning through the dopaminergic system
and the cerebellum provides opportunities for supervised learning through the error signal from the
inferior olive.
Five dyslexia paradigms:
- Motor-sequence learning paradigm dyslexics failed to activate their cerebellum, either
when first learning a task or after they had practised it to automaticity.
- Response-blending paradigm problems at the fast-learning stage, automaticity stage and
all intervening stages.
- Eye-blink conditioning paradigm primitive learning form.
- Visual-field displacement paradigm dyslexic group showed slower adaptation than
controls.
- Implicit learning paradigm deficits in serial reaction-time task and mirror-drawing task.
Procedural learning system role in language and motor skills and role in skill acquisition and
execution.
Important: Figure 1
Hypothesis: language-area abnormalities are the core cause of dyslexia, any motor problems are
secondary (associated rather than causal).
Handboek Taalontwikkelingsstoornissen sectie 7.3 Taalontwikkelingsstoornissen en dyslexie (Smits)
Dyslexie heeft in veel gevallen een erfelijke basis en wordt altijd beïnvloed door het onderwijs.
Pseudodyslexie kan ontstaan door inadequaat onderwijs.
Centraal probleem: herkenning van losse woorden. Oorzakelijke factor problemen met
foneembewustzijn en benoemsnelheid.
Definitie dyslexie p. 352.
Kenmerkend voor dyslexie: fonologische verwerkingsvaardigheden fonemisch bewustzijn en het
nazeggen van nonsenswoorden.
Multicomponentenmodel: TOS en dyslexie zijn soms aan elkaar verwant en soms niet. Doet recht aan
de heterogeniteit van en overlap tussen TOS en dyslexie. Probleem: houdt alleen rekening met
onderliggende factoren, en niet met de kwaliteit van de leerprocessen.
Dyslexievoorspellers benoemsnelheid, letterkennis, foneembewustzijn. Extra voorspellers TOS
hardnekkige fonologische spraakproblemen, problemen met meerdere taalaspecten.
Behandeling van dyslexie (met TOS) eerst staan het aanleren van de letters en de leeshandeling
centraal. Woord- en zinsniveau, kleine tekstjes. Bij leesondersteuning voorlezen, samen lezen en/of
herhaald lezen. Lezen zorgt voor automatisering van woordherkenning. Stillezen stimuleren.
, Week 2: Sociale Cognitie (Theory of Mind en Autisme Spectrum Stoornissen)
Do children with autism use the speaker’s direction of gaze (SDG) strategy to crack the code of
language (Baron-Cohen, Baldwin & Crowson)
Goal: Do children with autism use SDG or LDG when presented with new words.
SDG strategy children associate a novel word with the object that the speaker is looking at.
LDG strategy children associate a novel word with the object that they are looking at.
Hypothesis: children with autism prefer the LDG strategy over the SDG strategy.
Results Children with autism are more likely to use the LDG strategy. Normally developing children
prefer the SDG over the LDG.
Joint attention and vocabulary development: a critical look (Akhtar & Gernsbacher)
Joint attention = parents’ and children’s coordinated attention to each other and to a third object or
event. Is claimed to play a critical role in word learning.
In most studies, joint attention is indexed by the child’s gaze alternation. The child must alternate
his/her gaze between the third entity and the adult (joint engagement).
Joint focus may be critical for learning early words, but mutual engagement may not.
Typically developing children’s propensity to initiate joint attention remains rather constant, while
their propensity to respond to bids for their joint attention increases. Responding to joint attention
was found most correlated with vocabulary development in typically developing children.
Research on blind individuals: there are many other ways to establish joint attention other than
visual.
Liberally construed joint attention behaviours infants’ comprehension/production of language.
Resembles symbol-infused joint attention.
Conservatively construed joint attention behaviours children acting in ways that clearly
demonstrated awareness of an adult’s role in some mutual interaction involving objects.
Differences in cultures Not a lot of joint attention in Mayan cultures, especially with infants. This
makes the children more observant, allowing them to maintain simultaneous attention.
Proposition: children in all communities most likely learn some degree of their early words without
joint attention. Children growing up in cultural contexts in which they have to observe may be better
at learning words by attending to third-party conversations.
Autism & Williams Syndrome: children’s atypical joint attention appears to be unrelated to their
vocabulary development.
Down Syndrome: Children engage frequently in joint attention, however, this does not result in
relatively high language gains.
Handboek Taalontwikkelingsstoornissen sectie 7.1 Autismespectrumstoornissen (ASS) (Kingma-van
den Hoogen)
Autismespectrumstoornis (ASS) = complexe ontwikkelingsstoornis die problemen kan veroorzaken
met denken, voelen, taal en het vermogen om relaties aan te gaan. Neurologische stoornis.
