Browsing by master's degree program "Master's Programme in Logopedics"

Objectives. Semantic verbal fluency task is a naming task in which a participant produces words from a certain semantic category during limited time frame. Currently there is only a little research where the verbal fluency performance of young children, especially with hearing impairment has been studied, and findings have not been consistent. The question whether singing is associated with verbal fluency performance has not been studied much. The aim of this thesis was to compare verbal fluency performance of children with hearing impairment and normal hearing children. In addition, the aim was to investigate the association of singing with the semantic verbal fluency performance. Methods. This study sample contained 14 children with hearing impairment and 12 children with normal hearing. Participants performed two semantic verbal fluency tasks where they produced words from categories of animals and clothes for 60 seconds. The number of produced words and accepted words and semantic strategies (number of clusters, switches, semantic subcategories, the use of semantic strategy and the number of words in clusters) were examined. Amount of singing was investigated by means of questionnaire. Statistical methods were used to investigate differences between study groups and to investigate connection of singing and verbal fluency performance. Results and conclusions. The differences between the groups of children with hearing impairment and normal hearing children were not significant. Singing was associated with verbal fluency performance only in the group of children with hearing impairment and only in the animal task. Hearing impaired children who sang daily produced more words and used more word finding strategies than hearing impaired children who sang more seldom. The findings of previous studies are partly parallel to the findings of this thesis. However more research is needed for getting more consistent findings and more comprehensive research literature of the subject.

Objectives. This Master’s Thesis is part of the MULAPAPU (Miten MUsiikki-interventio ja LAulu PArantavat kuulovammaisten lasten Puhekieltä) research project and focuses on the first year pilot data. The aim of this Masters Thesis is to find out whether a music intervention of 6 or 10 weeks has an effect on how hearing-impaired children aged 2 to 6 years perform in a nonword repetition test, in repeating the number of syllables and word stresses correct as well as on their performance in the vocabulary use test. In addition, the aim is to examine whether music intervention has similar effects both on the performance in the nonword repetition test and in the vocabulary test and whether there is a correlation between them. Methods. The sample consisted of the results of 9 children using cochlear implant and/or hearing aid in the nonword repetition test and the Bo Ege vocabulary test. Four of the children participated in the music intervention in the autumn 2019 and five in the spring 2020. The effects of the intervention were analyzed by calculating percentages and averages which were presented in figures. The performance of both groups before and after the intervention was analyzed with one-sample t-test. Possible differences between the spring and autumn group on the effectiveness of the intervention were examined with the Mann-Whitney U-test. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to examine whether music intervention has similar effects both on the performance in the nonword repetition test and in the vocabulary use test and whether there is a correlation between them. Results and conclusions. The research results show that the use of vocabulary was improved by the music intervention but no evidence was found that music intervention would improve repeating syllables or word stresses correct. No statistically significant difference was found in the performance of the autumn and spring group. When examining whether the music intervention has similar effects both on the performance in the nonword repetition test and in the vocabulary use test and whether there is a correlation between them, no significant correlation was identified. Due to the small number of the research subjects, further research is needed to draw reliable conclusions.

Aims. Past research has shown that hearing impaired adolescents are at a higher risk of experiencing psychosocial difficulties than their hearing peers. The research into the factors related to the psychosocial well-being of hearing-impaired adolescents has not yet come to an unambiguous conclusion. There are indications that the wellbeing of hard-of-hearing youths would be related to their communicative abilities and the functioning of their hearing among other things. This study examines self-perceived psychosocial difficulties and strengths of adolescents with hearing impairment and factors associated with these difficulties and strengths. These results also are being compared to results of psychosocial well-being obtained from Finnish adolescents. Methods. 12 11-17-year-old youths with hearing impairment filled in the Finnish version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ-Fin) and a background questionnaire. Adolescents with other sensory deficits or disabilities were excluded from this study. Statistical analysis was performed to search for associations between psychosocial well-being and its related factors. Results and conclusions. The participants experienced more psychosocial difficulties than their Finnish peers. Emotional symptoms and peer problems were emphasized in the reports of participants. They also experienced more strengths in psychosocial well-being compared to their peers. In this study girls experienced more difficulties than boys. Participants experienced fewer difficulties in psychosocial wellbeing when their communicative abilities were good. These results can be used to improve and develop rehabilitation of hearing-impaired children and youths.

Semantic fluency task is often used as part of an assesment to investigate children’s lexical development. Semantic fluency task measures the ability to generate words within a certain category and within a restricted amount of time. In previous studies, children’s semantic fluency skills have increased as the child grows. In addition, word retrieval strategies have been found to enhance word recall in the semantic fluency task with school-aged children and adults. However, there is only little knowledge regarding the use of word retrieval strategies in the semantic fluency task with preschool aged children. So far, in previous studies word retrieval strategies in the task have not been investigated with children under the age of 4. The aim of this study was to examine whether there are differences in 2 to 5 year old children’s performance in the semantic fluency task and whether children’s gender or their parent’s socioeconomic status had an impact on their performance. In addition, the children’s ability of using word retrieval strategies were explored and the relation between the use of word retrieval strategies and the number of correct words were evaluated. The study sample included 79 children. Children completed two semantic fluency tasks guided by their parents in an online questionnaire. During the tasks, the children generated words belonging to the semantic category of animals and clothes within a minute. The performance was evaluated on the basis of the number of correct words, errors and error types. Word retrieval strategies were studied by examining clusters, semantic subcategories and switches between subcategories. The results of this study showed that age had a strong relation to performance on fluency tasks as measured with a number of correct words, clusters, semantic subcategories and switches. The new result was that even 2 year old children could generate correct words for the task and utilize word retrieval strategies in the tasks. The children’s gender or parents’ socioeconomic status had no effect on performance in the semantic fluency tasks. Number of clusters, semantic subcategories and switches had a positive relation to the number of correct words which indicated that successful word retrieval required use of fluency strategies even with preschool aged children. However, due to the lack of previous research data, more research regarding children’s word retrieval strategies is necessary. This study is the first in which the children’s word fluency task was guided by their parents. Clinical practice and further studies could benefit from these results that such a research design would appear to be suitable for assessing children’s semantic fluency.

In Finland there does not exists any assessment tool based on parent ratings which can be used to assess 2;6–4;0-year-old children’s language ability. The LEINIKKI method is under development to fill this gap. Before a new assessment method can be applied research has to exist about its reliability and validity to support conclusions made by the assessment method. The aim of this study was to gain information about the LEINIKKI method’s subscales that assess morphology and syntax skills when assessing preschool aged children. Reliability and validity were examined by internal consistency and concurrent validity, respectively. This study used data from the LEINIKKI research project. The sample included 60 healthy, monolingual Finnish-speaking children aged between 2 years 7 months and 4 years 1 month. In addition to parent report instrument (LEINIKKI) children’s language skills were assessed by examiner-administered tests (the Finnish Morphology test, the Finnish version of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales III). Internal consistency of the LEINIKKI method’s subscales that assess morphology and syntax skills was measured by the coefficient alpha and by examining the distribution of the answers. Concurrent validity was assessed by comparing the results from the LEINIKKI method and the examiner-administered tests by using correlation coefficients. Internal consistency of the LEINIKKI method’s subscales that assess morphology and syntax skills was high, although some items were very easy. Statistically significant correlations were found between the LEINIKKI method and the examiner-administered tests. The connections were moderately strong and positive. Thus, preliminary evidence of concurrent validity was achieved. Results indicate that the LEINIKKI method’s “Inflected forms and grammatical structures” subscale functions better with children under 3 years 6 months and “Language complexity” subscale functions better with children older than 3 years 6 months. Using the Mean Length of Three Longest Utterances (M3L value) in this population seems promising if the instructions can be modified so that parents understand them more consistently. This thesis focuses only on LEINIKKI method’s subscales that assess morphology and syntax skills. Results about the whole assessment tool’s usability and validity will be gotten after the normative study of the LEINIKKI method is ready.

Aim of the study. The aim of this thesis was to examine the self-repairs and their development in 4–5 years old children, who were learning finnish as their second language. It was also meant to find out, if the development of self-repairs was somehow different due to a linguistic small group intervention and along that, possibly enchanced language learning. Earlier research about the multilingual children's self-repair's development has been quite few, but the theme is interesting because of the known connections of self-repairs and the abilities of linguistic processing, for example (Zuniga & Simard, 2019). The previous studies have shown that the self-repairs of speech are usually targeted at such things that the child is lingually aquiring at that agepoint (Laakso, 2006). It is also known that higher levels of lingual knowledge are connected to more complex self-repairs (Dumont, 2010). Methods. There were 20 multilingual 4–5-year-old children, from the PAULA-project of the universities of Helsinki and Turku, who were chosen to the sample of this thesis. Half of them took part in a linguistic small group intervention during the one-year follow-up. This thesis' qualitative material included videotapes from the playsessions of child and research assistant. The videotapes were annotated using ELAN-software and every self-repair of the children was classified by the maker of self-repair initiation, the type of self-repair initiator and it's position and the self-repair's target. Statistics were made based on the classified self-repairs, and a quantitative analysis was carried out by observing statistical characteristics and using a repeated measures ANOVA. Results and conclusions. Results of the repeated measures ANOVA were not statistically significant, but some medium to strong effect sizes were noticed. At the level of the whole group (N = 20) there was a decrease in the number of self-repairs that begun without any clear initiator, which might denote that the abilities of using different initiators of self-repair are evolved in multilingual children at the age of four to five years. Also, the amounts of syntactic and morphological repairs were increased, which may in turn indicate that the syntactic and morphological parts of language become the core of linguistic development of multilingual children at that age. About the effects of the intervention was, for their part, noted that the usage of self-repair's initiator combinations and phonological repairs was increased in the intervention group. When assessing the reliability of the results, it should be rememberd that the statistical significance was not reached and that the sample was small.

Aims. This study examines the expressions of 4–5 year old bilingual (Russian-Finnish) children with and without developmental language disorder and the aim is to examine, how the morphosyntactic repertoires of these children differ from each other, what type of morphosyntactic changes are observable in these expressions and is it possible to track traces that illustrate the effect of crosslinguistic transfer of Russian language on the morphosyntax of Finnish language. Examining the language development of bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder is important, because more information about the linguistic features that indicate developmental language disorder is needed. This study is one of the first studies in Finland that examines the morphosyntax in the Finnish-language expressions of bilingual children, whose first language is a minority language. This study is part of the PAULA-project, which examines the effects of a small group intervention targeted to children with refugee and foreign backgrounds. Methods. The material of this study consists of video footage from the PAULA-project’s language assessment situations. The children’s skills were assessed with the Finnish Test of Phonology, the Reynell Developmental Language Scales (test of receptive speech) and The Cat Story 3 picture sequencing narrative task and in three short play situations. The expressions of four typically developing bilingual 4–5-year-old children and three 4-year-olds with developmental language disorder were transcribed from the video footage. The language samples were analyzed with the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn). Verb and noun inflection were also examined with qualitative methods. Results and conclusions. The morphosyntactic repertoires of case markers in the typically developing children’s nominal phrases turned out to be more extensive than the repertoire of the children with developmental language disorder. Use of adverbials in verb phrases indicated that the typically developing children were able to produce more complex phrases than children with developmental language disorder. In this study, the morphosyntactic features that seem to indicate developmental language disorder in the Finnish-language expressions were inappropriate use of case markers or the complete lack of case markers in noun phrases, frequent errors in subject-verb agreement, and ungrammatical word formation. Effects of crosslinguistic transfer were identified in the use of negatition, past tense and code-switching.

Aims. The aim of my study was to find out how much children, ages one to three, use functionally different kinds of pointing gestures, and whether their usage has a connection to children’s productive language development. I also surveyed in what kind of situations children use pointing gestures, and what kind of features are associated with their usage. Earlier studies have shown that the use of pointing gestures is at its largest at the age of 1,5 years, and that both the initiative pointing features and the declarative pointing features have a connection to the language acquisition of a child. The increase in number of pointing gestures precedes the growth of the productive vocabulary. It has been estimated that the combinations of pointing gesture and single word production in children predicts the skill to combine individual words into longer expressions. children begin to use combinations of pointing gestures and words about four months before they begin to combine individual words into longer expressions. It’s been noticed in earlier studies that different type of pointing gestures has different type of features, for example there is usually sound or word production with declarative pointing but imperative pointing often occur without word production. Methods. The source material of this longitudinal study consisted of a video material of five (n=5) children. For every child’s part, a 30-minute long video of a spontaneous playing or eating situation was analyzed at five different age points (1;0, 1;6, 2;0, 2;6 and 3;0). ELAN-software was used to mark the variables that were observed. The results were analyzed by statistical methods. The use of pointing gestures in different kinds of situations and the features associated with them were surveyed by the means of conversational analysis. Results and conclusions. The use of pointing gestures was at its height at the age point of 1;6, after which their use decreased. Initiatives and declarative pointings were the most commonly occurred functions. Answers and imperative pointings performed by pointing gestures appeared remotely in the entire source material, and no change in them was discovered between the age points. The amount of produced words grew bigger than the amount of pointing gestures a little before the children’s second birthday. Initiatives and declarative pointings were used by the children to draw an adult’s attention or to ask for the naming of objects. The children used imperative pointings most commonly when they wanted an object. Responsive pointings were used by the children to answer questions of adults. Initiatives, and declarative and imperative pointings were almost always related to production of language, unlike the responsive pointings. The results support former research data on the use of pointing gestures, and its connection to the development of children’s productive language acquisition. The results also support the importance of initiative and declarative pointing gestures in the development of a child's speech. The analysing of pointing gestures as a part of children’s interaction can aid to acquire a more thorough understanding of the development of a child’s speech and interactional skills during their first years.

Aim of the study. Multilingualism is globally more common than monolingualism and especially sequential multilingualism is increasing also in Finland. Reading is essential skill in our society, and it is a way to fully participate in information society. According to previous research, learning to read while also acquiring more than one language may differ from monolingual reading acquisition. The purpose of this study is to add knowledge about early reading of sequentially multilingual children and compare it to monolingual peers. This study aims to answer to the question if early reading of multilingual children differs from early reading of monolingual children at the age of 6 to 7. Additionally, the aim is to investigate the relations between early reading and linguistic factors and background factors. Methods. Participants of the study were multilingual pre-schoolers and first graders (n = 38) and monolingual pre-schoolers and first graders (n = 37). Reading tasks were letter-knowledge, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition and syllable reading. Linguistic factors were speech comprehension and verbal fluency and background factors time of exposure to Finnish language, parental education, and familial risk for reading difficulty. Mann-Whitney’s U-test was used to statistically analyse group differences. The relations between early reading and linguistic factors and background factors were investigated with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. Results and discussion. Multilingual children performed poorer than monolingual children in letter-knowledge and phonological awareness in all the participants and pre-schoolers. In first grade multilingual children performed poorer to monolingual children only in pseudoword repetition. There were statistically significant relations between speech comprehension and letter-knowledge, and speech comprehension and phonological awareness. A relation was found also between verbal fluency and rapid automized naming. The relations were slightly different in monolingual and multilingual children. There were barely any statistically significant relations between early reading and background factors. These results are in line with the view that multilingual early reading is different than monolingual, but multilingual children perform quite well considering their language proficiency in Finnish. The gap in reading skills between monolingual and multilingual children also narrows from pre-school to first grade.

Pikkukeskosilla (syntymä <32 rv ja/tai syntymäpaino <1500 g) on kohonnut riski kielenkehityksen haasteisiin. Heillä on ryhmätasolla havaittu viivästymää ja haasteita sekä ymmärretyssä että ilmaistussa kielessä. Varhaisten sanaston prosessointitaitojen eli kuullun puheen prosessoinnin tehokkuuden yhteyttä sanaston kokoon on tutkittu vasta vähän. Sanaston prosessointitaitojen on pikkukeskosilla havaittu olevan yhteydessä myöhempään sanaston kokoon, mutta taitoja ei ole verrattu samassa ikäpisteessä. Prosessointitaitojen yhteyttä sanaston koostumukseen ei ole tutkittu vielä lainkaan. Tämä pro gradu -työ on osa Turun yliopistollisessa keskussairaalassa toteutuvaa Auditory environment by Parents of Preterm infant; Language development and Eye movements (APPLE) –tutkimusprojektia. Tämän pro gradu –työn tavoitteena oli selvittää, millaista tietoa silmänliikkeisiin pohjaava sanaston prosessoinnin arviointimenetelmä antaa pikkukeskosten ilmaistun sanaston koon ja koostumuksen kehityksestä 18 kuukauden korjatussa iässä. Tutkittavien ryhmä koostui 20:stä pikkukeskosena (<32 rv) syntyneestä lapsesta (11 tyttöä ja 9 poikaa). Tutkimusmenetelminä 18 kuukauden iässä käytettiin silmänliikkeisiin pohjaavaa sanaston prosessoinnin arviointimenetelmää ja Varhaisen kommunikaation ja kielen kehityksen arviointimenetelmän Sanat, taivutukset ja lauseet -versiota. Tarkasteltavia muuttujia olivat sanaston prosessointitaidoista reaktioaika ja katseluaika, sekä sanaston kehityksen osalta ilmaistun sanaston koko, eri sanakategorioihin kuuluvien sanojen määrä ja sanojen osuus sanastossa. Muuttujien välisiä yhteyksiä tarkasteltiin Spearmanin järjestyskorrelaatiokerrointa käyttäen sekä lineaaristen regressiomallien avulla. Tuloksissa havaittiin useita tilastollisesti merkitseviä yhteyksiä pikkukeskosten sanaston prosessointitaitojen ja sanaston koon ja koostumuksen muuttujien välillä. Tehokkaampi sanaston prosessointi oli yhteydessä suurempaan ilmaistun sanaston kokoon (r .51). Sanaston prosessointitaidot olivat yhteydessä myös sanaston koostumukseen (r .51–.65). Tilastollisesti merkitsevistä yhteyksistä muodostetut regressiomallit osoittivat, että katseluajan muuttujat selittivät merkitsevästi ilmaistun sanaston kokoa ja koostumusta (R² .42–.57). Tämän tutkimuksen tulokset antavat uutta tietoa ilmaistun sanaston koon ja erityisesti koostumuksen kehityksen tarkasteluun suhteessa sanaston prosessointitaitoihin.