Summer Neurolinguistics School 2024: Lectures, Talks and other School activities

Isabelle Barriere, Molloy University, New York

The impact of environmental and linguistic factors on bilingual development.

This presentation will focus on how the quantity of input and the linguistic characteristics of the Heritage Language impact the development of bilingual children in the majority language.  Data collected on Russian (Heritage Language)- English bilingual preschoolers residing in NY investigated their phonological and morphosyntactic development.  The features under investigation (lax vowels and subject-verb agreement) exhibit different degrees of contrasts between English and Russian. The results reveal that the percentage of exposure to English and the linguistic characteristics of Russian impact these two aspects of bilingual development differently.  The clinical and educational implications of these findings will be discussed. 

Irina A. Sekerina, City University of New York
Svetlana V. Dorofeeva, HSE University

Research methods and tools for assessing children’s language and speech:
from world tradition to Russian practice.

It is crucial to explore different features of language and speech acquisition from an early age in order to understand the mechanisms of speech development in children. In this talk, there will be discussed traditional, globally-known approaches to the research on children’s speech, instruments used in the national practice, as well as some modern solutions devoted to the designing valid diagnostic instruments used for the assessment of speech development in children.

Anastasiya Lopukhina, Royal Holloway, University of London

From first sounds to complex texts: how early stages of language acquisition predict children's later language skills.

Can the melody of children's cries, their babbling, and their first sounds predict their future language development? Are there reliable predictors of speech and language impairments that parents and SLPs speech-language pathologists can observe in the early years of a child's life? Furthermore, is there such a thing as 'early intervention' for speech and language impairments? This lecture will explore contemporary research addressing these questions.

Vardan Arutiunian, Seattle Children’s Research Institute

Neurophysiological mechanisms of speech impairment in children with autism spectrum disorders.

Neurobiological studies of the past decade have suggested that the imbalance between neural excitation (E) and inhibition (I) in the neural systems is one of the key pathophysiological mechanisms in autism. Cortical gamma-band oscillations (30–100Hz) measured with electro- and/or magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) are considered as a non-invasive measure of E/I balance and, thus, they are of particular interest in autism research. 

In the talk, the results of the different projects addressed gamma-band activity in autism will be presented. The results of the studies have demonstrated that this type of neural activity (both during rest and stimulus-induced) is altered in children with autism, can be related to clinical characteristics and can be even an early predictor of communication abilities.

Tatiana Kotova, RANEPA University

Modern approaches to children language acquisition in theories of cognitive development

There is a cornerstone in the field of cognitive development research on the patterns of speech development, which concerns the specificity of the learning mechanisms involved. Are general cognitive functions (i.e., attention and memory) sufficient enough to cover the mechanisms of word and grammar acquisition in children? Or is it necessary to introduce some unique regularities, which can be found in advance in human cognitive abilities and can differentiate humankind from other animals? Will these unique regularities be used in other spheres of human development, for example, in the research on other cultural aspects? In this talk we will discuss different approaches, proposing the solutions to these issues, as well as their empirical arguments.

Alexey A. Kotov, HSE University

The naming effect and categorical learning in adults and children

In this talk we will discuss a new and important naming effect — how does the simplicity of naming different parts of the objects influence the categorical learning: new rules of categorization can be learned with more ease, when the corresponding objects consist of the parts, which can be named more easily. Although this effect has been described recently, research in this area showed its importance not only for the understanding of the mechanisms behind categorical learning, but also those behind selective attention. We will also discuss different approaches to measuring the size of this effect, its limitations according to the types of tasks and categories. In the second part of this talk we will discuss our recent research on age-related patterns in the emergence of the naming effect in ontogeny as well as the features of its use in adult-guided learning.

Elizaveta I. Galperina, Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry
of the Russian Academy of Science

“Growing up” of syntax. Neurobiological basis.

The lecture will consider the neurophysiological basis for syntactic processes in speech. How does this change with age and what morphofunctional changes are these processes associated with? Is the development of syntax the same in different languages? What is known and what remains to be discovered.

Militina Gomozova, HSE University

Standardized test for assessing speech and language development “KORABLIK”: application in clinical and research practice.

For standardized language assessment in children from 3 to 11 years of age, the new RuCLAB test (Russian Complex Language Assessment Battery) was developed. The test consists of 11 tasks that assess language skills at phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and discourse language levels. RuCLAB showed its efficiency in quantitative and qualitative assessment in children’ clinical populations. During this presentation we will share our experience of RuCLAB usage in groups of children with developmental language disorder and autism spectrum disorder.

Svetlana V. Dorofeeva, HSE University

Mechanisms of dyslexia: evidence from experimental studies.

Dyslexia is a specific (not associated with visual, hearing, or intellectual impairment) developmental disorder that is characterized by persistent difficulties in mastering reading skills and is associated with specific features of brain development and/or functioning. Over the past two decades, there has been significant advance in understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms of typical and atypical reading development. In the lecture, we will consider traditional classifications of dyslexia used in our country and will focus on hypotheses about the causes and mechanisms of reading disorders, formed on the basis of experimental studies, including neuroimaging studies.

Olga Serebrovskaya, Center for the Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation

Specific speech development disorders as an interdisciplinary 

The relevance of the topic is due to the prevalence of specific speech development disorders (SSDD) in the child population and the high comorbidity of this type of impairments with other disorders. In the lecture we will consider the etiology and pathogenesis of SSDD, the features of their classification and coding from the point of view of various scientific fields. We will focus on the interprofessional and interdepartmental aspects of complex medical, psychological and speech therapy care, taking into account high comorbidity, and also we will analyze the methods used from the standpoint of evidence-based medicine.

Apart from the key-note lectures, there will be short oral presentations during the Summer School. These presentations will be devoted to the practical findings in the research on children speech:

Maria Dyachkova, HSE University 

MLU and IPSyn as methods for assessing the level of speech development and their application to longitudinal data of Russian-speaking children

The creation and testing of objective methods for assessing speech development plays an important role in the correct assessment of a child's language skills. Our report focuses on two methods: MLU (mean length of utterance) and IPSyn (Index of productive syntax). MLU is a method that estimates the average length of a child's utterance in words or syllables. IPSyn also allows you to evaluate the grammatical complexity of children's speech, identifying the morphological and syntactic structures that the child uses. These tools were offered for English, but have been adapted into Russian. In the report, we will examine these methods in detail based on the material of longitudinal studies of 7 children and discuss how successfully they assess the speech development of Russian-speaking children.

Valeriia Lelik, HSE University 

Assessing the morphological diversity of children's speech using the MSP measure (based on longitudinal corpus data)

This talk describes a methodology for estimating morphological richness by computing MSP (mean size of paradigm) value. MSP is applied to corpus data and is equal to the number of unique word forms divided by the number of unique lemmas in the selected period. This value was previously used to study the relationship of nominal and verbal morphology between child-directed speech and children’s speech.

High MSP value means a large morphological richness of speech. In this talk we will describe an application of MSP methodology to longitudinal data of two Russian-speaking monolingual and two English-Russian bilingual children created in the CHILDES corpus format. Special attention will be paid to child-directed speech as one of the key factors influencing morphology acquisition.

Elena Barybina, kindergarten №7 “Solnyshko”

Experience in using the diagnostic tools “KORABLIK” and “RuToPP” in the practice of a speech therapist with older preschoolers and younger schoolchildren

This talk will be devoted to the experience in using two diagnostic instruments: KORABLIK and RuToPP, on different stages of speech therapy sessions with preschoolers and students of primary school. There will be discussion of the necessity in reevaluation of traditional approaches to speech pathology detection as well as the efficiency of modern standardized test assessments. 

Moreover, during the School there will be held a series of workshops on the use of different test instruments, designed in the Center for Language and Brain. Colleagues from the Center will present such instruments as “KORABLIK”, “KARASIK”, RuToPP battery, etc. They will also show how to implement these instruments in practice. 

Please, note, that participation in the workshops requires additional registration (will be open later).

The event is organized in the framework of a research grant funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (grant ID: 075-15-2022-325).