Linguistic and social treatment of

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

using Scratch



Noelia Di Pretoro
University of Udine
Abstract
In this note, we present a novel approach in using
Udine, IT 33100, Italy visual programming languages and in treating Specific
noelia_dp@yahoo.it Language Impairments (SLI). Starting from the
characteristics of SLI, in particular of syntactic
impairment, and from the need to develop
metalinguistic awareness, assuming that the latest
researches in computer programming assessing it as a
language are right, we show the theoretical possibility
to treat linguistic impairments, for what concerns
linguistic and social difficulties, through the use of
visual programming, in particular of Scratch. This study
does not have an application in the field yet, but we
believe in the importance of sharing these ideas.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for Author Keywords
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are Specific Language Impairment; SLI; programming;
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights
syntactical treatment; bilingualism; Scratch;
for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other metalinguistic awareness.
uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
IDC '16, June 21-24, 2016, Manchester, United Kingdom ACM Classification Keywords
ACM 978-1-4503-4313-8/16/06.
D.1.7 Visual Programming; K.3.1 Computer Uses in
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2930674.2935985
Education; K.4.2 Social Issues.

541
Introduction
There are two different aspects which need to be
considered when we talk about Specific Language
Impairment (SLI). First of all, and maybe the clearest
one, the linguistic level of the child. Linguistically,
children with SLI present a general delay in the
development compared to children of the same age.
Then, we have a more hidden aspect: children social
life and consideration. In the field, it is used to
distinguish three main social spheres which need to be
studied and treated when we talk about SLI, and in
general about special education needs: family, pairs,
and educators. Children with or without special needs
have the need to feel autonomous and useful for the
community they live in. The feeling of self-efficacy is an
important player for any treatment or intervention, and
needs particular attention to achieve positive results
[15]. Scratch was basically created as a platform to
create and share with others projects based on
individual ability and interest [18]. This made its
fortune as tool applied in different fields and
educational levels. But, it is with the experimentation
on Brandy [16] for teaching literacy that Scratch
expressed all its potential. Before the treatment,
Brandy was not able to read and write, to speak and
listen to long sentences, she was not socially accepted
in the community of Clubhouse. After the exposure to
technology and to Scratch, she improved and she
started to communicate and to write, she took part to
her community. This study is a clear example of the
potentialities of Scratch in both linguistic matters and
social issues. In this note we are going to better define
the characteristics of Specific Language Impairment
(SLI) and the methods of intervention generally used;
then we will focus on visual programming languages
and Scratch. Particular attention will be given to the
542
concepts of bilingualism, metalinguistic awareness, and
social aspects of both language and computing.
Specific Language Impairment
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is an impairment
which involves the way a person understands and/or
produces language [1]. Generally, their profiles are
characterized by a language delay which cannot be
associated to other factors (psychological, neurological,
physical diseases or inabilities, etc.). This kind of
persons are not able to process and produce language
for the range of their age [21]. Language impairment
can affect different aspects of language. By the way,
due to the effect of comorbidity and to the specificity of
its appearance, a classification of the impairment has
been hard. In general, difficulties are found in
vocabulary and syntactic structure which appears
reduced in respect to age target. Specifically, Friedman
classifies four different groups of SLI based on their
major difficulty: Syntactic (SySLI), Phonological
(PhoSLI), Lexical (LeSLI), and Pragmatic (PraSLI) [10].
For the interests of this note we will focus on children
with SySLI. People with syntactic impairment have
difficulties with wh- movement and object relatives in
both comprehension and production. Instead, their
lexical and phonological abilities are regular.
SySLI Intervention Methods
For the treatment of SySLI experts have used three
clusters of intervention: grammar facilitation,
acoustically modified speech, and metalinguistic
approaches. The first method aims to create and repeat
some targets to help children to identify grammar rules
which they generally omit. The acoustically modified
speech focuses on sound processing and speech
comprehension in order to enhance their ability of fast
processing and short time speech. Finally,
metalinguistic approaches are based on the explicit
teaching of the language with the use of shapes and
colors to underline some aspects of the sentence or
discourse (thematic roles, morphology, parts of speech,
etc.) [6]. In particular, this last approach has obtained
major results in the recovering of language impairment.
In fact, other studies have shown that a poor
metalinguistic awareness (defined as the ability to
understand the implicit rules of a language) can affect
the general linguistic abilities of children with SLI [2].
Moreover, some researchers have stated the
importance of the metalinguistic awareness for
language learning and competence [8]. Finally,
researches have shown that an explicit language
teaching has a positive impact on linguistic delay [9].
In this regard, bilingualism seems to have an important
role [4]. According to recent researches, learning two
or more languages enhances the development of
metalinguistic awareness, creativity and problem
solving in regular conditions [3]. Even though the
research is not abundant, in the presence of subjects
with SLI this seems to be confirmed [7]. In fact, Roeper
shows that a more explicit grammar teaching, thanks to
the enhancement of metalinguistic awareness, can have
a knock-on effect on the acquisition of linguistic
structures in another language and with that on the
linguistic delay [19].
Programming Languages
Visual Programming
Visual programming languages have the characteristic
of letting the user creating programs by graphic
manipulations rather than textual specifications of
program elements. Visual languages provide graphical
or iconic elements available to modifications codified by
543
a spatial grammar. Users can individually modify the
elements to create new programs without the use of
textual code [11]. Scratch is one of the most famous
visual programming languages in education. Deriving
from Logo, its fame and effectiveness is particularly due
to its interface which is particularly approachable. The
use of building blocks, as Lego components, defined by
colors and shapes makes it particularly easy to use and
to manipulate. Finally, Scratch is a free multi-platform
program which is readable by all operating systems and
is available both offline and online with the presence of
a really participative community. All those
characteristics make Scratch unique.
Programming and Bilingualism
Recent studies have shown some common features in
learning a second language and a programming
language: linguistic transfer and metalinguistic
awareness [20]. The linguistic transfer is due to the
negative influence of the first language on the second
one. Generally, it appears through the creation of
neologisms and/or the transfer of lexical rules,
morphology, and syntactical structures in the second
language grammar. In programming languages it has
been found that learners used to transfer concepts from
their mother tongue making their learning increasingly
difficult. Another aspect which has caught the attention
of researchers is the relationship between programming
languages and metalinguistic awareness. Even though
the research is controversial in this respect, some
studies have shown that this relationship exists.
Especially, it has been found that children with linguistic
impairment or lack of literacy take advantage in using
technology and programming languages [22]. As it was
for Logo, the use of Scratch seems to develop the
metalinguistic awareness in children.

Figure 1: Syntactic tree of the
sentence “Ana loves the chocolate
that I bought”, where:
S = sentence
NP = noun phrase
VP = verb phrase
WHNP = wh- element configured as
noun phrase
SBAR = first lower level of S
This structure and the one with
parenthesis consider the elements
to the right side as dependent form
the elements to the left side. In this
case, the sentence “I bought” is
dependent from the sentence “Ana
loves the chocolate” through the
wh- element “that”. They are a
different representation of the
same sentence.
Treating Linguistic Impairments Through
Visual Programming
As we have seen, the idea of treating linguistic
impairments using programming languages is not a
novel concept within the research. First, Leher and
DeBernard [13], then Peppler and Warchauer [16] have
shown the possibility of recovering linguistic delay with
the aid of Logo and Scratch. In this note we would like
to demonstrate the possibility to treat, in specific,
syntactical linguistic impairment. As we defined above
this cluster of children has difficulties with what
linguistics calls long-distance relationships. These are
complex sentences which involve movements of some
basic parts (wh- elements, objects), fundamentals to
the right understanding, processing, and creation of
such sentences. In a sentence like “Ana loves the
chocolate that I bought”, a child with SySLI will
encounter much difficulty to understand ‘who is who’
and ‘who does/loves what’. The interpretation of
thematic roles and the movement of the object make
this sentence inaccessible for children with SySLI. The
sentence above can be analysed as follow: “I bought
chocolate for Ana” and “Ana loves that chocolate”. In
this case, it is clear that the person who bought
chocolate for Ana it is me and that Ana loved it. These
two sentences can be easily put in relationship.
Linguistically, what happens when we decide to merge
these two sentences is a series of movements:
▪ Ana is the subject of the main sentence “Ana loves
the chocolate”
▪ The article ‘the’ needs some kind of specification of
which chocolate Ana loves
544
▪ “I bought [chocolate]” becomes a specification and
we will find it under the government of the relative
“that”
In this case, “Ana loves the chocolate”, which is in time
an action which comes after the action of “I bought
chocolate”, is the main sentence with a tail that is
important for the right understanding of the sentence:
Ana does not love chocolate in general, Ana did not buy
chocolate on her own, “Ana loves the chocolate that I
bought”. The result is a structure defined below,
represented in Figure 1:
[S [NP Ana] [VP loves [NP [NP the chocolate] [SBAR
[WHNP that] [S [NP I] [VP bought]]]]]]
This introduction was necessary to visualise both the
difficulties of interpretation for such a sentence and the
resulting structure of the sentence. As we can see, we
have one main block (“Ana loves”) which govern
another big block (“the chocolate”) under which we find
the last element that specify it (“I bought”) preceded
by the relative (“that”). Clearly, this structure makes
the sentence much accessible. But, we have also seen
that the use of colours and shapes can also help
children with SySLI. So, if we use colours and shapes to
highlight the different relationships, the result would be
the one shown in Figure 2. The kind of sequence we
see in Figure 2 is not so rare to find in a project with
Scratch. For example, Scratch the cat could be asked to
“repeat forever” an action “until touching an object/
color”. In this note, we are not comparing the contents,
which are obviously different. In fact, we lose the
relationship between the shapes circle and rhombus,
which respond to a boolean variable (Yes/No). But, we
are taking into consideration just the similar structures

Figure 2: Syntactic three of the
sentence “Ana loves the chocolate I
bought” modified with colours and
shapes to underline syntactic
structure and relationship between
the elements. The choice of colours
and shapes is obviously not casual.
For the ones that are familiar with
Scratch, it has been easy to
distinguish the different categories
in which the sentence was split in:
Control (in yellow), Operators (in
green), and Sensing (in light-blue).
In specific, we have a loop (“Ana
loves”), a control element which
responds to a condition defined
through an operator (“that”) which
selects a sensing block which
detects the last element (“I
bought”).
In Scratch it will be something like
this:
which comes out. Programming with Scratch allows to
find repetitively useful structures which are difficult to
interpret by SySLI children. This aspect is extremely
important if we take into consideration the intervention
methods seen above. The repetition of chunk of clauses
or entire sentences can be difficult and demotivational
for a child with SySLI. While, using Scratch, the child
can try, verify and constantly modify the sequence of
blocks with a positive attitude. Moreover, the result of
the sequence is immediate and neutral. There is not
another person that saying what is right and what is
wrong, but this relation is expressed through the
sentence “It does not work (as I want)” [14]. Finally,
the last aspect, which needs to be analysed in this
note, is the development of the computational thinking
in learning programming. We define computational
thinking that set of abilities which allows to decompose
a complex problem (algorithm) in a series of easier
sub-problems. As we have seen above, for a children
with SySLI the understanding of the sentences “I
bought chocolate” and “Ana loves that chocolate” is
easy, while the sentence “Ana loves the chocolate that I
bought” is extremely difficult. Decomposing complex
sentences in shorter and easier clauses is a really
advantaging ability to develop. Programming has been
found the easiest way to enhance computational
thinking.
Social Aspects
Socially, children with SySLI encounter difficulties in
being accepted within the society they are living in. It
can come from the family, scholastic agents, and/or
from pairs. The feelings of usefulness and self-efficacy
are factors that can enhance or preclude any recovering
in children with SySLI. The more a child is taken into
consideration for his/her strengths than his/her
545
weaknesses the more the environment is positive and
neutral the more the child will learn. This is much more
true for SySLI children. In this regard Scratch is useful
for two main reasons. On the one hand, it is a neutral
platform. It does not underline inabilities but the fact
that the program may work or not as we expected.
Moreover, in case the program does not work, children
are pushed to ask for help spontaneously both to
professors/experts and pairs. In this case, it does not
matter who is giving me help as long as the problem is
solved. Finally, especially at the beginning, it is
something new for the majority of people in classroom.
This means that any child starts from the scratch and
builds up programs based on own creativity, ability and
interest. On the other hand, Scratch is provided by an
extended community online which creates, modifies,
comments, improves projects. This is a clear example
of Social Computing [23], which is not limited to a
classroom, but extended to the world. People who take
part in this community need to be registered and to
upload program coherent with the aim of Scratch. In
that it is a really secure environment. Users can create,
upload and being seen in real time by the whole
community all over the world and receive comments,
being cited in another project and do the same with the
programs of others. It is a loop that makes Scratch a
real community and a cooperative learning
environment. For children with SySLI these
characteristics can be really advantaging.
Conclusion
In this note we have shown the theory of an ongoing
project in order to give new tools for SySLI treatment
and to respond to the extreme need to introduce
children to programming. Nowadays, computer science
is growing in importance [17] and there is the risk to
leave apart those who are considered in difficulty.
Scratch is an important tool which could avoid these
differences [18].
The next steps in program are to try to verify the
theory by some workshops which will involve sixty
children, twenty for each class. These classes will be
formed following two principles, which will ensure the
social neutrality: first, children in classroom will not
know each other; second, in each class there will be
five children with SySLI. All children will be tested
linguistically before and after the treatment. There will
be a sentence to analyse, first linearly (on the paper)
and then using the block of Scratch as Image 2 shows.
Children will be tested according to time and accuracy.
Acknowledgments
We thank all the volunteers of the Association
CoderDojo Fossò (Italy), the Departments of Linguistics
and of Computer Science of the University of Ca’
Foscari Venice, and all publications support and staff,
who wrote and provided helpful comments on previous
versions of this document.
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