Papers by Hans van Balkom
Multimodal technologies and interaction, May 7, 2024
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Psychology Press eBooks, Sep 12, 2003
Contents: W.J.M. Levelt, Preface. L. Verhoeven, H. van Balkom, Introduction: Developmental Langua... more Contents: W.J.M. Levelt, Preface. L. Verhoeven, H. van Balkom, Introduction: Developmental Language Disorders: Classification, Assessment, and Intervention. Part I: Etiology. N. Botting, G. Conti-Ramsden, Characteristics of Children With Specific Language Impairment. J. Reilly, J. Weckerly, B. Wulfeck, Neuroplasticity and Development: The Acquisition of Morphosyntax in Children With Early Focal Lesions and Children With Specific Language Impairment. P.H. Been, F. Zwarts, Language Disorders Across Modalities: The Case of Developmental Dyslexia. P.H.T. Leppanen, H. Lyytinen, N. Choudbury, A.A. Benasich, Neuroimaging Measures in the Study of Specific Language Impairment. R.B. Gillam, L.M. Hoffman, Information Processing in Children With Specific Language Impairment. S. Goorhuis-Brouwer, F. Coster, H. Nakken, H.L. Spelberg, Environmental Factors in Developmental Language Disorders. Part II: Typology. B. Maassen, Speech Output Disorders. J. Katz, K. Tillery, Central Auditory Processing. L.B. Leonard, P. Deevy, Lexical Deficits in Specific Language Impairment. D. Ravid, R. Levie, G.A. Ben-Zvi, Morphological Disorders. J. de Jong, Grammatical Impairment: An Overview and a Sketch of Dutch. H. van Balkom, L. Verhoeven, Pragmatic Disability in Children With Specific Language Impairments. Part III: Assessment and Intervention. D.V.M. Bishop, Specific Language Impairment: Diagnostic Dilemmas. P. van Geert, A Dynamic Systems Approach to Diagnostic Measurement of SLI. H. de Ridder, H. van der Stege, Early Detection of Developmental Language Disorders. S.F. Warren, P.J. Yoder, Early Intervention for Young Children With Language Impairments. L. Verhoeven, E. Segers, Benefits of Speech Manipulation for Children With Language Disorders. J. Law, The Close Association Between Classification and Intervention for Children With Primary Language Impairments.
Various user groups, e.g. people with a disability, could benefit highly from products or interfa... more Various user groups, e.g. people with a disability, could benefit highly from products or interfaces that could either be adjusted (adaptability) or adjust themselves (adaptivity) to the needs of individual users. Advances in technology are gradually enabling designers to create such products, but guidelines that help designers doing this are scarce. Designers need more insight in the implications of adaptivity on the form and content of their design in order to make good design decisions. In this paper we try to shed some light by giving an example from the LinguaBytes project, a three-year research program aimed at developing an interactive and adaptive educational toy that stimulates the language and communication skills of children between 1 – 4 years old with multiple disabilities. We will illustrate five example users from this heterogeneous user group with respect to their needs and skills (perceptual-motor, cognitive and emotional) and try point out how adaptivity and adaptability play a role in the design of one of our products.
Very young non-or hardly speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimu... more Very young non-or hardly speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimulate interaction with their environment in order to develop their communicative and linguistic skills. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems can help this process, provided that they are tuned to this specific user group. LinguaBytes is a research programme, which aims at developing an interactive and adaptive educational toy that stimulates the language and communicative skills of multiplehandicapped children with a developmental age between 1-4 years. In this article we show which guidelines we consider essential for developing this tool. We have developed several concepts based on these guidelines, of which we elucidate one called Explorascope (E-scope). E-scope consists of a tangible toy-like interface that is adaptable to an individual child with respect to his or her cognitive, linguistic, emotional and perceptual-motor skills. A user test with the first version of E-scope shows that adaptive, toy-like educational tools are promising and useful for this user group.
Developmental Neurorehabilitation
Mind understanding allows for the adaptation of expressive language to a listener and is a core e... more Mind understanding allows for the adaptation of expressive language to a listener and is a core element when communicating new information to a communication partner. There is limited knowledge about the relationship between aided language and mind understanding. This study investigates this relationship using a communication task. The participants were 71 aided communicators using graphic symbols or spelling for expression (38/33 girls/boys) and a reference group of 40 speaking children (21/19 girls/ boys), aged 5;0-15;11 years. The task was to describe, but not name, drawings to a communication partner. The partner could not see the drawing and had to infer what was depicted from the child's explanation. Dyads with aided communicators solved fewer items than reference dyads (64% vs 93%). The aided spellers presented more precise details than the symbol users (46% vs 38%). In the aided group, number of correct items correlated with verbal comprehension and age.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00992 Investigating executive functions in children with severe speech an... more doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00992 Investigating executive functions in children with severe speech and movement disorders using structured tasks
Foundations of phonological awareness in pre-school children with cerebral palsy: The impact of i... more Foundations of phonological awareness in pre-school children with cerebral palsy: The impact of intellectual disability
Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy, 2017
This chapter discusses the Communicative Competence Profile (CCP); a socio-neurocognitive assessm... more This chapter discusses the Communicative Competence Profile (CCP); a socio-neurocognitive assessment method which provides a reasoning and explanatory model to guide clinical decision making for goal setting in intervention on communicative competence for children with severe developmental disorders (SDD). The central underlying notion of the CCP is that information on the development and organization of communication and communicative competence in the brain provides insight in the overall development, learning capacity and more specifically language and literacy acquisition. The CCP helps to disentangle a combination of mutually reinforcing disorders. Research evidence is gathered from socio-neurocognitive studies, affording reasoning and explanatory schemes to substantiate goal setting for intervention. A clinical case study illustrates the application of the CCP.
Scientific Studies of Reading, 2018
The present article aimed to explore how the development of reading comprehension is affected whe... more The present article aimed to explore how the development of reading comprehension is affected when its cognitive basis is compromised. The simple view of reading was adopted as the theoretical framework. The study followed 76 children with mild intellectual disabilities (average IQ = 60.38, age 121 months) across a period of 3 years. The children were assessed for level of reading comprehension (outcome variable) and its precursors decoding and listening comprehension, in addition to linguistic skills (foundational literacy skills, rapid naming, phonological short-term memory, verbal working memory, vocabulary, and grammar) and nonlinguistic skills (nonverbal reasoning and temporal processing). Reading comprehension was predicted by decoding and listening comprehension but also by foundational literacy skills and nonverbal reasoning. It is concluded that intellectual disabilities can affect the development of reading comprehension indirectly via linguistic skills but also directly via nonlinguistic nonverbal reasoning ability. According to the simple view of reading, reading comprehension depends on the strength of two core skills: word decoding and listening comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Their relative contributions to reading comprehension have been found to change over grades (Ouellette & Beers, 2010; Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, & Chen, 2007). Early reading comprehension is limited by what the child is able to decode, and word decoding is the dominant predictor for reading comprehension at this stage. Once word decoding skill is developed sufficiently, the level of reading comprehension will be more strongly linked to the level of listening comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Landi, Frost, Mencl, Sandak, & Pugh, 2013). It is known that a limited general intelligence can severely affect the acquisition of decoding skill and reading fluency (Lemons et al., 2013), but its influence on the developmental pattern of reading comprehension is far from clear. The role of general cognitive ability in typical populations can be better understood while examining the development of reading comprehension in children with significant limitations in general intelligence. The present article uses a longitudinal design to investigate the development of reading comprehension and its precursors in a group of children with intellectual disabilities. Precursors of reading comprehension Within the simple view framework, longitudinal studies have shown a relationship between linguistic precursors in early primary school and reading comprehension in later primary school (Catts, Herrera, Nielsen, & Bridges, 2015; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004). To read in an alphabetic language, children must first be aware of the alphabetic principle; they must understand CONTACT Evelien van Wingerden
Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 2016
Enhancing communication performance skills may help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to expand th... more Enhancing communication performance skills may help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to expand their opportunities for participation in daily life. It is a clinical challenge for speech-language pathologists (SLP) to disentangle various mechanisms that contribute to the language and communication problems that children with DS encounter. Without clarity of different levels of functioning, appropriate interventions may be poorly conceived or improperly implemented. In the present study, the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health – Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY) framework was used to classify contributing factors to communication performance in a multiple case study of six young children with DS. Within a comprehensive assessment, we identified individual and environmental facilitators and barriers, leading to an integrative profile of communication performance (IPCP) for each child. Whereas these six children shared a developmental, and/or expressive ...
Item does not contain fulltex
Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden vermenigvuldigd e n /o f openbaar worden gemaakt middels druk, ... more Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden vermenigvuldigd e n /o f openbaar worden gemaakt middels druk, fotokopie, microfilm, geluidsband of op welke andere wijze dan ook, zonder voorafgaande schrifte lijke toestemming van de copyrighthouder.
Item does not contain fulltex
Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 2009
Background For preschool children, the home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in... more Background For preschool children, the home literacy environment (HLE) plays an important role in the development of language and literacy skills. As there is little known about the HLE of children with intellectual disabilities (ID), the aim of the present study was to investigate the HLE of children with ID in comparison with children without disabilities. Method Parent questionnaires concerning aspects of the HLE were used to investigate differences between 48 children with ID, 107 children without disabilities of the same chronological age and 36 children without disabilities of the same mental age (MA). Furthermore, for the children with ID, correlations were computed between aspects of the HLE and children's non-verbal intelligence, speech intelligibility, language and early literacy skills. Results and conclusions From the results of the multivariate analyses of variance it could be concluded that the HLE of children with ID differed from that of children in the chronological age group on almost all aspects. When compared with children in the MA group, differences in the HLE remained. However, differences mainly concerned childinitiated activities and not parent-initiated activities. Correlation analyses showed that children's activities with literacy materials were positively related with MA, productive syntax and vocabulary age, and book orientation skills. Also, children's involvement during storybook reading was related with their MA, receptive language age, productive syntax and vocabulary age, book orientation and rapid naming of pictures. The amount of literacy materials parents provided was related to a higher productive syntax age and level of book orientation of the children. Parent play activities were also positively related to children's speech intelligibility. The cognitive disabilities of the children were the main cause of the differences found in the HLE between children with ID and children without disabilities. Parents also adapt their level to the developmental level of their child, which may not always be the most stimulating for the children.
Uploads
Papers by Hans van Balkom