Title of presentation Phonologically balanced nonwords: Enhancing the tools for investigating the phonological aspects of SLI Authors’ names and affiliations Catherine E Dickie, University of Edinburgh Mitsuhiko Ota, University of Edinburgh Ann Clark, Queen Margaret University Name, address, telephone number and email address of contact person Catherine Dickie [email protected] Preferred presentation format (oral presentation or poster): Oral

Phonologically balanced nonwords: Enhancing the tools for investigating the phonological aspects of SLI

Recent work on the genetics of SLI has demonstrated that there is a linkage between nonword repetition performance and a locus on chromosome 16 (SLI1) (SLIC, 2002; SLIC, 2004; Monaco & SLIC, 2007). Although the nonword repetition paradigm offers great promise for the investigation of phonological skills, the analysis of response patterns from the CNRep/NWR tasks which have proved so useful in genetic studies has been hampered by their lack of control over phonological variables. Factors such as the uneven distribution of consonants and clusters, inclusion of inflectional and derivational morphemes, uncontrolled distribution of stress patterns, etc, mean that there are difficulties with analysing responses from phonotactic, morpho-phonological, and prosodic perspectives (see, e.g., Snowling, et al., 1991; van der Lely & Howard, 1993; Dollaghan et al., 1995; Sahlen, et al., 1999; Dickie et al., 2008). In the present study we construct a revised set of nonwords which remains similar to the NWR Test in terms of size and scope, but which builds on the strengths of more recent nonword repetition tasks (e.g., Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998; Marshall & van der Lely, 2009) in order to shore up its main weaknesses so that the details of participants’ repetition responses to be analysed more straightforwardly. The set of nonwords presented here consists of 32 items, controlled for syllable length (equal numbers of 2, 3, 4, and 5 syllables), stress pattern (two equally frequently realised stress patterns for each of the syllable lengths), lexicality (all constituent syllables are drawn from a pre-established inventory of CV and CCV nonsense syllables), cluster location, biphone co-occurrence probability, and consonant type (‘difficult’ consonants are excluded from the inventory). The results of piloting this test on 7 year old children with and without language disorder will also be reported.

References Dickie, C., Clark, A., Ota, M., Nasir, J., O’Hare, A., & Watson, J. (2008). 'Nonword repetition in children with SLI and their parents: Looking for phonological similarities.' British Association of Clinical Linguistics (BACL) Symposium, Reading, December 2008 Dollaghan, C.A., Biber, M.E. & Campbell, T.F. (1995). Lexical influences on nonword repetition. Applied Psycholinguistics 16: 211-222 Dollaghan, C.A. & Campbell, T.F. (1998). Nonword repetition and child language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 41: 1136-1146 Gathercole, S.E., Willis C., Baddeley A.D., & Emslie H. (1994). The children’s test of nonword repetition: a test of phonological working memory. Memory 2:103–127 Gathercole, S.E. & Baddeley, A.S. (1996). The Nonword Memory Test. Available from authors on request. Marshall, C. & van der Lely, H.K.J. (2009). Effects of word position and stress on onset cluster production: evidence from typical development, Specific Language Impairment, and dyslexia. Language 85: 39-57 Monaco, T. & SLIC (2007). Multivariate Linkage Analysis of Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Annals of Human Genetics 71: 660–673 Sahlén, B., Reuterskiöld-Wagner, C., Nettelbladt, U., & Radeborg, K. (1999). Nonword repetition in children with language impairment – pitfalls and possibilities. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 34 (3): 337-352 SLIC (2002). A genomewide scan identifies two novel loci involved in specific language impairment. American Journal of Human Genetics 70: 384–398 SLIC (2004). Highly significant linkage to the SLI1 locus in an expanded sample of individuals affected by specific language impairment. American Journal of Human Genetics 74: 1225–1238. Snowling, M.J., Chiat, S.,& Hulme, C. (1991). Words, nonwords, and phonological processes. Applied Psycholinguistics 12(3): 369-373 van der Lely, H.K.J. & Howard, D. (1993). Specifically language impaired children: Linguistic impairment or short term memory deficit? Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37: 1193–207