00:00:00:00 - 00:00:40:22
Professor Pamela Snow
Hello, everyone. My name is Pam Snow. I'm a professor of cognitive psychology in the School of Education at La Trobe University in Bendigo. It's a very great honor to be with you, even in this virtual sense, for this, webinar on vulnerable witnesses that's being convened by the Judicial College of Victoria. And I extend my gratitude to the college for the invitation to be involved.
00:00:40:24 - 00:01:08:01
Professor Pamela Snow
I'd like to begin my presentation this evening. It is actually this evening for me. By acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which I live and work, which in my case here in Bendigo is the Dja Dja Wurrung people and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. So now I'm going to share my screen with you to get my presentation visible.
00:01:08:03 - 00:01:55:00
Professor Pamela Snow
And then I'm going to try and get that into full display mode. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There we go. That's that's what. Okay, so, part of the, work that I do at the tribe in Bendigo is working in our newly established solar lab. The science of language and reading lab. And that's, a platform that's been, created at Latrobe this year to promote effective early reading instruction and support for all children, most particularly children who are starting from behind in some way.
00:01:55:02 - 00:02:18:11
Professor Pamela Snow
Now, what I'd like to do in this presentation is talk to you about this phenomenon of language, what language is, what, what is the terminology that we use in speech pathology to unpack the concept of language? I'll talk a little bit about how language development is influenced by early environment, because it's very heavily influenced in that way.
00:02:18:11 - 00:02:46:07
Professor Pamela Snow
In fact. And why language development is important in its own right. And because of some of the developmental advantages that it confers, then we'll have a look at some factors that make communication skills vulnerable in general, and also in the context of the courtroom. And we'll also look at how communication issues can be present in the courtroom and how communication barriers can be managed in that context.
00:02:46:09 - 00:03:07:24
Professor Pamela Snow
I won't spend time going through this, but also provide you some resources at the end, that you might find useful for your own. Further reading. So first of all, what is this thing called language that we all use every day, all day, every day and take for granted. But we don't necessarily stop and give it a lot of thought.
00:03:08:01 - 00:03:33:09
Professor Pamela Snow
I often use this, cartoon in my presentations because I think it very cleverly shows, how liberate, how elaborate language can be, even just when there's only two words in the frame. And it takes quite a sophisticated knowledge of language to, to get the joke there and to understand that there's a word that can have two different meanings.
00:03:33:09 - 00:04:08:21
Professor Pamela Snow
It's been used by the speaker in one way. It's been interpreted or understood by the listener in another way. And we can all say that there's, impending catastrophe. So we don't have to have a lot of words sometimes in order to convey a lot of meaning. So what do we mean by this term? Oral language? Where in my speech pathology now, the terminology that we use when we talk about language is that we refer to everyday talking or expressive skills.
00:04:08:22 - 00:04:36:21
Professor Pamela Snow
Speaking skills, if you like, and everyday listening, or receptive skills or comprehension skills. So there's a couple of important concepts here. And the first is that this is a two way process when we're talking about a person's or language skills, we're not just talking about, their ability to express themselves, to convey ideas, to put words together into spoken sentences.
00:04:36:23 - 00:05:03:06
Professor Pamela Snow
We're also equally interested in their ability to take in information that are spoken by others, to understand, to process, to get to the meaning of other people's language, because this is a two way process. It doesn't work if you've only got one channel open. The other thing that's important here is that language is a representational system, and it represents mental processes.
00:05:03:09 - 00:05:37:19
Professor Pamela Snow
So it represents thoughts, ideas, memories, beliefs, ideas, opinions. I think I said ideas twice. So it has to have that higher order cognitive component behind it. Otherwise we'd really be talking about artificial intelligence. We'd be talking about Siri. So we can ask Siri a question and sometimes get an answer, but not at a deep conversational level, because Siri fortunately, at this stage anyway, it doesn't have mental representations.
00:05:37:20 - 00:06:02:17
Professor Pamela Snow
So oral language is a two channel process, and it represents a vast array of mental processes. Now we often say, and I often say when I'm talking to audiences of teachers, which I do quite a lot, that the written language system in English is a bit messy. But it's also important to remember that the spoken language system in English is a bit messy.
00:06:03:22 - 00:06:28:14
Professor Pamela Snow
It's actually quite complex, and there are lots of interesting historical reasons for why that is. But language is a complex process. It's a complex, higher order process. And we'll talk a little bit about the fact that although it's biologically, natural and something that we humans have evolved for, that doesn't mean that it's set and forget, you know, developmental things.
00:06:28:16 - 00:06:56:17
Professor Pamela Snow
So just to give you a really quick with around the park in terms of some of the components of language, it consists of sounds, and obviously the first sounds that babies can produce is crying. And then they move through a range of other, vocalizations before they start to produce words and word parts moving into phrases, sentences, and then connected talk or discourse and are various different kinds of discourse, some of which you can see listed here.
00:06:56:17 - 00:07:18:15
Professor Pamela Snow
Conversation, which is two way narrative which is sharing your experience by telling a story. So it's either a factual story or a fictitious story. And then there there is, a couple of kinds of discourse that we use to explain things. One is procedural discourse that we use when we explain to another person how to do something.
00:07:18:17 - 00:07:49:00
Professor Pamela Snow
And expository discourse, which is when we're teaching about a topic, the language is very, very light, going from sounds initially all the way down to expository discourse. Language, of course, is one aspect of spoken communication. It sits alongside speech, which is the mechanical process of pushing air out of our lungs, breaking up the air stream using the articulators, the teeth, the lips, the jaw and so forth.
00:07:49:24 - 00:08:17:13
Professor Pamela Snow
We have voice. We have to have, voice production in order to be, effective, or to for communication to be easy, we need to have voice production, which is the function of the larynx and the vocal cords. Fluent speech occurs when we're not, pausing, hesitating and blocking. And probably the most characteristic disorder that's affected by fluency, of course, is stuttering.
00:08:17:15 - 00:08:44:24
Professor Pamela Snow
And then pragmatics is how we pull it all together as communicators to become effective communicators in a range of different situations on a daily basis. So pragmatics refers to our ability to make adjustments to the way that we use communication according to contextual and social features of the purpose of the interaction. And I'll come back to that. I'll come back to that right now.
00:08:44:24 - 00:09:13:11
Professor Pamela Snow
In fact, so pragmatic language competence, we can say really is what we want for all speakers. So we want all speakers to have the language functions that you can see listed up here. So to have vocabulary and syntax and the the component parts of language, the building blocks of, of language, they're essential. They also need to have higher order.
00:09:13:11 - 00:09:49:02
Professor Pamela Snow
Executive. Cortical functions. So attention planning organization and so forth. We need to have social cognition functions, which is our ability to read the play in social situations to detect subtle, effective cues and change the way that we're communicating according to real time feedback that we're getting. And of course, all of this is somewhat dependent on our own individual psychological characteristics and the social, cultural and environmental or context that we live in.
00:09:49:02 - 00:10:34:13
Professor Pamela Snow
So communication is a very, very complex process. And it shouldn't surprise us that I it takes a long time developed mentally to reach a point of competence and be it doesn't take much at all to nudge that competence and disrupt that competence. So either in the form of developmental neurological disorders or acquired disorders across the lifespan, one of the things that makes human language and the quality of human communication, so delicate is the fact that we all need to have not only word knowledge, but also world knowledge.
00:10:34:13 - 00:11:11:23
Professor Pamela Snow
So to be an effective communicator, we need to know stuff. We need to have world knowledge. We need to know about how the world works. We need to understand everyday world concepts. That we then can talk about effectively. And sometimes, of course, there are communicators who have a superficial knowledge of words, but not a deep knowledge of the world that sits behind those words, and that can pose a real threat to the quality of their communication skills.
00:11:12:00 - 00:11:43:22
Professor Pamela Snow
If I'm spending more time with you, I would dig more deeply into this concept. But I just want to flag, what I think, some interesting characteristics of the English language, but characteristics that make communication more challenging for speakers, other speakers who are children and in the usual developmental process, or speakers who have some kind of neuro biological disorder that makes it hard for them to acquire a full range of linguistic tools.
00:11:43:24 - 00:12:30:12
Professor Pamela Snow
And one of the characteristics I'm thinking of here is the fact that many words in English are poor listeners. That means they have many meanings, but importantly, their spelling and pronunciation. Well, pronunciation can vary a little bit I guess, with some of these words, but in general it doesn't. And the spelling doesn't change. So you can see some examples here of words where, a child or even in some cases an adult may have stored in the lexicon in the in the language part of the brain, they may have these words stored with one meaning attached to them, but not with other alternative meanings that other more competent users would be aware of.
00:12:30:14 - 00:12:52:22
Professor Pamela Snow
So an obvious example is the word funny. If I met your father and said, oh, I met your dad. He's a funny guy, isn't he? You might think, well, do you mean funny ha ha. Or funny? A bit weird because you might think that your dad could take both of those boxes. If you look at a word like chips, it could mean something savory that you eat.
00:12:52:22 - 00:13:21:07
Professor Pamela Snow
It can mean chunks of wood, or it could mean gambling tokens. A bank can be a financial institution. It can be, something that you can rely on. So then it becomes, a verb. So it's changed. It's part of speech. Or it can be the side of a river. We know in terms of etymology that those meanings have some broad, similarity, with respect to their origins.
00:13:21:09 - 00:13:48:24
Professor Pamela Snow
But in terms of the surface use every day that they, quite different. So this is just one of the ways in which English language can be quite confusing and can cause stumbles in everyday interactions, particularly with speakers who are vulnerable in some way. Another way that language is complex for us as speakers is that we operate at two quite distinct levels.
00:13:48:24 - 00:14:20:08
Professor Pamela Snow
We operate at a literal level and a non-literal or figurative level. So we use a lot of linguistic devices, such as the ones that you can see listed on this slide to make our everyday interactions with each other more interesting, more colorful, more entertaining. But in so doing, we make communication more opaque. For children, who don't understand, for example, that a sarcastic remark when it's raining outside and an adult says, oh, lovely weather today.
00:14:20:10 - 00:15:10:11
Professor Pamela Snow
That's quite confusing. For a four year old, because they don't understand that there's a linguistic device being used there, and the listener needs to invert the meaning 180 degrees in order to arrive at the intended meaning, which is different from the stated meaning. So all of these linguistic devices are used. Quite freely, quite automatically between competent uses of language everyday, but they create additional stumbling blocks for speakers who, perhaps, well, for children, for people across the lifespan with neuro biological disorders or even people from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds who don't understand, there's non-literal ways of using language and turn of phrase.
00:15:10:13 - 00:15:35:02
Professor Pamela Snow
So here's some examples of these, linguistic devices. So here we've got well, I think you can, you can say for yourself probably, what, what example we have here that we have an example of, of sarcasm. There's a lot of information in the body language there that's telling us that there might be a distinction between the surface meaning and the deep meaning.
00:15:35:17 - 00:16:15:00
Professor Pamela Snow
Here we've got, a politeness convention at work. So someone wondering one thing that we all try to do in everyday communication is ensure that the other person doesn't lose face. We we try to not cause tears and rips in the social fabric when we interact with each other. So here we've got someone on the left who's probably the boss and is probably a bit annoyed, with the underling who's turned up late but rather than directly saying I'm annoyed because you were late, this is an indirect communication device here, a politeness, convention.
00:16:15:02 - 00:16:40:03
Professor Pamela Snow
It could also be said to look a little bit snide. It's not actually sarcastic, but it is a figurative use of language with the stated meaning and the intended meaning, and not 100% the same, because I don't think he's actually concerned about whether it's what is wrong or not, but he's wanting to convey a sense of annoyance to the other person.
00:16:40:21 - 00:17:01:14
Professor Pamela Snow
Yes. If some of you might have been in this situation, getting a phone call from, adult offspring, now, you know that if you get this phone call in the middle of the day, it's not a, a vague ad hoc inquiry about your plans to use your vehicle today. You know that there is a reason behind this.
00:17:01:16 - 00:17:38:11
Professor Pamela Snow
And I think probably every person listening to this webinar knows that if they got such a phone call, the first thing they would say is why? What's happened? Because we know again that there's an indirect request behind that question. So these are just some examples of that distinction between literal meaning and intended meaning. And sometimes that meaning, that distinction, the distance between the literal meaning and the intended meaning can be quite considerable in everyday communication.
00:17:38:13 - 00:18:05:08
Professor Pamela Snow
Another thing that's important to consider about, children's language exposure and of course, the kind of language experiences that we have in the preschool years do a great deal to set us up one way or the other, for better or for worse, across the lifespan. There's very good research that tells us that there are big differences in children's preschool language experience, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
00:18:05:08 - 00:18:36:16
Professor Pamela Snow
So we know, unfortunately, that there's a social gradient that children strong such that children of higher socioeconomic status, parents tend to, hear a lot more words. They hear more elaborate words. They hear words used in longer, more elaborate, more complex sentences. However, we need to remember that not all low socioeconomic status families are providing linguistically under nourishing environments.
00:18:36:18 - 00:18:58:15
Professor Pamela Snow
Not all higher SES families are necessarily doing a fantastic job. We know that this problem exists at a population level, but we just need to be a little bit careful with over generalizing from that data. We also know that language skills are related to the human capital and the social capital that are present in a family, not just the economic capital.
00:18:59:06 - 00:19:27:11
Professor Pamela Snow
But we know that, the findings that have been reported in overseas studies, particularly the US, in the UK, also appear out here in Australia. So we also have this problem of a social gradient such that some children come into school with far more, elaborate language systems, expressively and receptive lay than their peers from more disadvantaged backgrounds.
00:19:27:13 - 00:19:49:14
Professor Pamela Snow
We also know that language and culture are very, very closely related to each other. And culture is not just a simple matter of vocabulary and the different words that people use and the different names that they have for things, it also relates to the fact that English, for example, has many more shades of meaning than a lot of other languages.
00:19:49:14 - 00:20:23:14
Professor Pamela Snow
And again, that's a historical quirk of English because of the fact that we've borrowed words from Latin, from Greek, from French, from Nordic countries. But we didn't throw out words that we already heard. So we're very good at shades of meaning in English. Perhaps more so than, speakers in of some other, languages. Different cultures vary, with respect to, how they deal with the question of speaker autonomy and how power shifts between speakers.
00:20:23:14 - 00:20:50:04
Professor Pamela Snow
And that relates, of course, to the rules of tone taking and topic management. Who's allowed to introduce a new topic, who's allowed to in the topic? Culture is very important for exposure to idiom, and I'm sure many of you have traveled overseas, even to other English speaking countries, and have discovered the idioms that we use here are not used or understood in America and the UK, and vice versa.
00:20:50:06 - 00:21:26:16
Professor Pamela Snow
Culture impacts on non-verbal conventions in communication, such as the use of eye contact and physical proximity, and it also has implications for the relationship between children and adults in conversation. Develop mentally. We know that language keeps company with a range of, other really important processes and domains. So it keeps company with the development of cognition, with the development of emotional self-regulation, of the ability to think reason, problems.
00:21:26:16 - 00:21:53:11
Professor Pamela Snow
Or we use language for all of those things. We and children use language, to problems. So you'll hear young children talking to themselves and trying to to talk their way through a problem. We use language to make predictions, to remember, to take the perspective of another person. We use language to move from the concrete and the literal to the abstract and the figurative.
00:21:53:21 - 00:22:10:13
Professor Pamela Snow
And we also use, language, when we're, thinking about thinking and when we're talking about language, metacognition is thinking about thinking matter. Language is talking about language.
00:22:10:15 - 00:22:40:18
Professor Pamela Snow
Now we know that language development and early mental health go together very, very closely. And the, infant mental health space is a very important one, developed mentally in the first two years of life. The quality of the interpersonal space is profoundly important. We want to see infants cared for in highly reciprocal, responsive, dyadic relationships. We want to see, adults being child led, lots of emotional warmth and attunement.
00:22:40:20 - 00:23:06:22
Professor Pamela Snow
This all leads to the development of empathy and perspective, taking through the use of words to describe emotional states, affective states, which produces the ability over time to take responsibility for emotional self-regulation. So the reins for that are gradually hand it over from the adult to the child over a period of many, many years. Language is also related to that process.
00:23:06:23 - 00:23:40:14
Professor Pamela Snow
I mentioned earlier of social cognition, the ability to read, read the play in real time in social situations, and of course, where all of these factors are in play in a healthy way in the first two years of life, they culminate in secure attachment. And secure attachment is a gift for life, not just for infancy, because it is the underpinning of mental health and the ability to form and maintain relationships with other people, and to deal with the ups and downs inherent in relationships with others.
00:23:40:16 - 00:24:13:12
Professor Pamela Snow
And unfortunately, of course, we all know that there is a particular, subset of children who miss out on all of these developmental benefits. And in particular, they're the children who come into contact with the child protection system. But those children, if you like the extreme markers of risk, there are a lot of other children who don't meet the threshold for child protection notifications, but who nevertheless don't experience optimal early emotional, environments.
00:24:13:14 - 00:24:33:01
Professor Pamela Snow
So a way of thinking about this is a model that I've, developed over the last few years and finally got around to publishing this year. And this is the idea of building a house. So we know when we build a house that we can't start with walls, and we certainly can't start with the roof. When we build a house, we've got to start with, foundations.
00:24:33:01 - 00:25:00:16
Professor Pamela Snow
But before we can even put foundations down, we've got to think about the, the ground that we're putting those foundations on. So in this model, the ground is the social and emotional context in the first couple of years, and then the foundations for the house are going to be the first five years of oral language experience, expressively and deceptively, the ways that children experience language being used, in particular with the adult caregivers.
00:25:00:18 - 00:25:18:09
Professor Pamela Snow
Oops, going the wrong way. So then we can start to think about the walls of the house. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about this today. I could happily talk about this for hours, but I'm going to be quite disciplined. The wall on the, the right hand side is the development of pro-social interpersonal skills.
00:25:18:24 - 00:25:44:22
Professor Pamela Snow
And here the home language and literacy environment is, is very important. So this is the using language to form and maintain relationships side of the house. On the other side we've got the transition to reading, writing and spelling. So here the instructional environment is particularly important. And like any house it needs walls on both sides. It's going to fall over if you don't have strong walls on on both sides.
00:25:44:22 - 00:26:16:05
Professor Pamela Snow
So oral language supports the ability to form and maintain relationships. And it also supports the ability to make the transition to reading, writing and spelling because they are language based activities. When children go to school, then we can put a big structural beam across the top of the walls and that social, emotional, behavioral well-being, social cognition skills, emotional self-regulation these are the things that employers value very highly and often referred to as soft skills.
00:26:16:05 - 00:26:37:19
Professor Pamela Snow
But of course, we all know that there's nothing soft about them at all because they're very difficult in many cases to confer. If they're absent, they're difficult to teach when they skills are absent. And then we can put a roof on the house, which is academic achievement. And retention, because we want all young people to stay at school and to achieve at school.
00:26:38:10 - 00:27:10:24
Professor Pamela Snow
We want them to transition to further education and training. We want them to be part of the social and economic mainstream and have marketable employment skills. Even without, Covid 19. We're living in an economy in which jobs for unskilled workers are disappearing, so we cannot afford to have young people in large numbers exiting school. Often, early, around the age of 15, as you know, only semi-literate and unable to gain marketable employment skills.
00:27:10:24 - 00:27:31:02
Professor Pamela Snow
That's a recipe for disaster. Okay, so I've been talking a lot and talking about language skills. So, this is a little party trick I like to do when I'm interacting face to face with people. I'm not sure how it will go in this virtual sense, but I'm going to get you to do a little listening activity for me.
00:27:31:02 - 00:27:54:13
Professor Pamela Snow
So you need to put down any other things that you're looking at at the moment. That might be distracting you if you're doing some multitasking, and listen to the instruction, because then you need to do what I've asked you to do. All right. I want you to pick up your file, a dictaphone, and place it. Perry, plan to lay along the high postponed aspect of your department.
00:27:54:15 - 00:28:15:19
Professor Pamela Snow
Okay, so now, at this point, you're probably thinking. What what what what what? You want me to do something with something? Well, this is to give you a sense of what it's like being in the world of a child with a language disorder. A child who, wants to comply, wants to follow instructions, wants to be part of the crowd.
00:28:16:18 - 00:28:47:02
Professor Pamela Snow
But simply cannot keep up with the verbal, information processing requirements of following what for everybody else is a simple instruction. But to them sounds like it's being delivered in a foreign language. And of course, what this means for children is that in the classroom context, they become very distractible. They spend time off task, they're trying to model, their actions or what people around them are doing.
00:28:47:13 - 00:29:16:11
Professor Pamela Snow
And so their behavior looks like they're not paying attention. And we start to see quite a strong overlap. Certainly by the mid primary school years between language disorders, learning difficulties, behavior problems and attention problems, and that tends to be, a bit of a perfect storm, unfortunately. Particularly for children whose lives are characterized by a range of other risk risk factors as well.
00:29:16:13 - 00:29:47:02
Professor Pamela Snow
So what are the factors that make communication skills vulnerable? Language is something of a paradox. It's that thing that we humans have evolved a special facility for in an evolutionary sense. So we have a language instinct. That's pretty well agreed amongst cognitive scientists. But, instinctive in all is language is an innate, you know, as language is it's also highly delicate and vulnerable.
00:29:47:02 - 00:30:20:01
Professor Pamela Snow
It's it's vulnerable to a range of, developmental conditions, such as the ones that you can see listed here on this slide. It's sensitive to, genetic factors and it's sensitive to environmental exposure. And we've talked about that already in terms of the social gradient. So language is not set in. Forget. Yes we have a language instinct. And in other presentations when particularly when I'm talking to education audiences, I'm at pains to point out that we don't have a reading instinct.
00:30:20:01 - 00:30:47:11
Professor Pamela Snow
Reading actually has to be taught because it's not biologically natural. So we do have a language instinct, but it's also a skill that's highly vulnerable, and it doesn't take much to give it a nudge. So communication skills are vulnerable by virtue of developmental stage, which is not the same as someone's, age, although obviously there's a degree of correspondence there.
00:30:48:02 - 00:31:19:09
Professor Pamela Snow
Low socioeconomic status is going to have implications in many cases for children with respect to the, elaborate ness of the vocabulary that they're exposed to, the degree of sentence complexity that they hear, the use of idiomatic language, figurative language, metaphorical language, and also the level of background knowledge. You'll remember I talked earlier about the importance of word knowledge and world knowledge.
00:31:19:11 - 00:31:44:08
Professor Pamela Snow
And typically children who have good word knowledge also have good world knowledge because those two things go hand in hand. If you're a four year old whose parents take you to the zoo and take you to the museum and take you to art galleries and science works and so forth, you're learning a whole lot of words, but in tandem, you're learning about the world and that makes you, more linguistically competent.
00:31:44:10 - 00:32:20:08
Professor Pamela Snow
And it's also very advantageous for you when you go to school. Mental health problems and mental health comorbidities make communication skills, vulnerable. And they, common, in, certainly in, youth offender populations and in child protection populations, depression and anxiety are common as and so they're the internalizing mental health problems, but also externalizing mental health problems such as behavior disorders and attentional difficulties are also, common.
00:32:20:10 - 00:32:59:05
Professor Pamela Snow
And they commonly co-occur with communication. Vulnerabilities. All of us, communicate more poorly when we feel stressed, afraid, anxious. Probably most of us can withstand some hunger. But, fatigue, will also impact for all of us, but certainly, more so for children and adults across the lifespan who have some form of developmental, neuro biological, disability, will be more impacted by those physiological factors.
00:32:59:19 - 00:33:25:17
Professor Pamela Snow
The presence of neuro disability. We should assume that where there is a non diagnosed neuro disability, that it will impact on communication skills and it will do so across the lifespan, the problems will not go away. So I'm hard-pressed to think of a neuro disability. And when I think neuro disability I think autism spectrum disorder, I think intellectual disability, I think developmental language disorder, I think acquired brain injury.
00:33:25:20 - 00:33:59:08
Professor Pamela Snow
I think fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. They probably the big ones. And they all have significant implications for communication skills, expressive and receptive language abilities in particular. And those problems do not resolve just because someone's getting bigger and older. Other factors that make communication skills vulnerable to communication partners not making a big effort to tune in and understand how that person communicates the addition of speech sound disorders.
00:33:59:08 - 00:34:32:00
Professor Pamela Snow
So it's one thing for someone to have a language disorder and to have limited vocabulary and limited ability to put words together in sentences and to understand what other people are saying. But that problem can be really compounded by someone not being able to accurately produce the speech sounds in their language, which means that the rest of us have trouble in the same way that we have trouble understanding a 3 or 4 year old who we don't know very well because they're substituting sounds.
00:34:32:00 - 00:34:59:23
Professor Pamela Snow
So, a, a three year old might say doc instead of stop. And if you don't know that, you might not understand what they're saying, but someone who is familiar with them will immediately know that because their ear has tuned in and understands the pattern of substitutions that the child is using, the presence of sensory disturbances, particularly hearing loss, will be a compounding factor.
00:35:00:09 - 00:35:32:11
Professor Pamela Snow
Maltreatment histories of various forms, all have implications for communication skills across the lifespan and of course, disrupted and truncated education because communication competence and language development specifically is just so from the language house that has to continue to develop right across the, childhood and adolescent years into early adulthood. So language development is not just something that happens in the first five years.
00:35:32:11 - 00:35:56:15
Professor Pamela Snow
A lot of it happens in the first five years, but language continues to develop and become more elaborate and sophisticated right across the secondary years, and of course, even into adulthood and beyond. And having a disrupted or truncated education is a huge disruption to that process. And it leaves enormous gaps in that word knowledge and world knowledge space.
00:35:56:15 - 00:36:27:03
Professor Pamela Snow
And all of these factors, of course, are overrepresented in children and adults who need to appear before the courts. So if we think in relation to, young people in youth justice in particular, we can think about youth justice and or out-of-home care because, as you know, they can be, quite strongly overlapping populations. We know that there's, a range of factors that are overrepresented in those populations.
00:36:27:15 - 00:36:57:15
Professor Pamela Snow
One of them, of course, is being male. But we also know there's an overrepresentation of all of the factors that you can see listed here. I've highlighted in red history of behavior and conduct disturbance, because that's the thing that the adults in a child's world will tend to notice. We won't necessarily notice, or be tuned in to the fact that a child might have a developmental language disorder.
00:36:57:17 - 00:37:24:01
Professor Pamela Snow
But we will notice that their behavior is disruptive and interfering with our life if we were a parent or a teacher. So behavior can be a little bit like a blanket that throws itself over everything else and makes it hard to see some of the other developmental processes that are occurring. And in particular, it can make it hard for us to see some of the intervention labors that need to be pulled.
00:37:24:03 - 00:38:01:02
Professor Pamela Snow
So now we can look at all of those same risk factors for involvement in youth justice and child protection. And so what are the implications for language development. And unfortunately, individually little and collectively they don't bode well for language development because of that, issue that I mentioned earlier of. On the one hand, language is, biologically natural, but on the other hand, it's not set in forget and it's highly vulnerable to a range of genetic factors and environmental exposures and experiences.
00:38:01:04 - 00:38:24:09
Professor Pamela Snow
So that brings me, to what I think is really important, but, not nearly well enough known disorder that we are fortunately hearing a lot more about in recent years. And that's developmental, a language disorder. Professor Dorothy Bishop, who's one of the world experts on DLD, from the University of Oxford, refers to this as the most common disorder you've never heard of.
00:38:24:11 - 00:38:55:20
Professor Pamela Snow
DLT affects about 7% of the population. Estimates vary 7 to 10%. What that translates into from good epidemiological research that's been done in the UK is about two children in every class. So Dr. occurs when children struggle to acquire language skills, vocabulary, sentence structure, expressive abilities, receptive abilities, the ability to move between the literal and figurative in the absence of identifiable factors that would account for that.
00:38:55:20 - 00:39:23:02
Professor Pamela Snow
So Deal Day occurs in the absence of autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and so forth. It's not a marker of low IQ. It's got major implications for learning to read and for academic success. Significant implications for making and retaining friends. So it's very important in relation to mental health. And it's often undiagnosed or misattributed to behavior or attentional problems.
00:39:23:04 - 00:40:00:00
Professor Pamela Snow
It doesn't go away and it persists into adulthood. But it's it's presence tends to be masked in adulthood by mental health difficulties. And, social avoidance in many cases. Now has a close relative. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this right now. But what I've been talking about thus far is Deal day developmental language disorder and its close relative language disorder does occur in the context of other syndromes because, as I've already mentioned, all of those other, disorders have implications for language development.
00:40:00:02 - 00:40:29:20
Professor Pamela Snow
And there's a website down there where you can go for some further information. But the the take home message here is that this is much more common than something like autism spectrum disorder, but much less well understood, unfortunately. And it needs to be much better identified and understood in both the education and the judicial, setting. So let me tell you very quickly about some of our research on the language skills of young people in the youth justice setting.
00:40:30:11 - 00:40:53:08
Professor Pamela Snow
What we've identified in this research has also been carried out overseas. But our focus on our research here in Australia, we can say that conservatively, about 50 to 60% of young male offenders have a clinically significant but undiagnosed, developmental language disorder. So that means it's not explained away on the basis of low IQ or mental health problems.
00:40:53:08 - 00:41:28:13
Professor Pamela Snow
Those those things can coexist, but they're not the explanatory mechanism. We've found in one of our large studies a link between DLD and past history, I mean, to personal violence such that young people who had been convicted of more violent interpersonal crimes had poorer language skills than those whose crimes were of a less severe nature in the interpersonal space, we found higher rates of DLD in young people who entered the youth justice system via the child protection door.
00:41:28:15 - 00:41:57:10
Professor Pamela Snow
Higher rates of DLD in young people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, even though we were very careful in that particular study to control for standard Australian English exposure. So we only included young people in that study, young Aboriginal people who told us that they considered, standard Australian English to be their first language and we also found higher rates of DLD in young female offenders than, female non offenders.
00:41:57:12 - 00:42:32:04
Professor Pamela Snow
But that that rate is not as high as it is in young males. This is a paper that we've just recently published about the language, literacy and mental health profiles of adolescents in out of home care in Australia. It's a small study. But we've found that 92% had oral language skills below the average range. And when we assessed the, reading comprehend and skills, again, 92% in the very low range, 65% of them failed a measure of single word reading ability.
00:42:32:04 - 00:43:18:00
Professor Pamela Snow
So this is really, really, incredibly impoverished, everyday language and literacy skills. So how do communication issues present in the court? Well, when we're talking about, language abilities, in everyday communication, we're talking about conversation, which is a two way process. We're talking about narrative discourse, the ability to share experiences by telling stories, procedural discourse, the ability to explain to someone how to do something, expository discourse, talking about a topic, teaching about a topic, and those, discourse genres, often all get mixed up together in everyday life.
00:43:18:00 - 00:43:47:19
Professor Pamela Snow
So we could construct narratives, for example, in the context of a conversation, when two people are sharing an experience with a third person, but being interviewed or cross-examined or addressed in court is different. It's different from the ways that everyone is used to using communication to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their communication opportunities and experiences. Being in court, is a very different verbal milieu.
00:43:47:22 - 00:44:22:16
Professor Pamela Snow
There are very different rules that occur in court, and they're not all explicit and overt. So what's different here is that the the interlock at a the other, the communication partner is a powerful stranger. The context is new, it's daunting, and it's high stakes. Stress, confusion and anxiety are likely to be present. Those physiological factors that we talked about earlier that are bad for everybody's communication, but particularly bad in the context of, vulnerable communicators.
00:44:23:10 - 00:44:51:01
Professor Pamela Snow
It's not a conversation on what goes on in the context of, say, a forensic interview isn't a conversation, but confusingly, it has some features that resemble conversation and what children are used to and what adults with communication disorders are used to is the other speak, doing a bit more of the heavy lifting, doing a bit more rescuing.
00:44:51:03 - 00:45:31:16
Professor Pamela Snow
And the other speaker being concerned with promoting communication success. But in a court situation, it's not actually the interlocutors job to promote communicative success in the same way that, children and adults are used to in other real world contexts in which their performance is quite heavily scaffolded. Children are used to being scaffolded, communicative like by adults. Adults with communication disorders are used to being scaffolded by other adults, but in the court, everything changes.
00:45:31:18 - 00:45:57:17
Professor Pamela Snow
There's also a greater reliance on monologues, so on the person having to speak themselves rather than co construction which is counter to everyday experience. Have a listen to some of your own conversations over the next few days. Particularly at home, and you'll realize how much co construction there is of a narrative. How much interrupting there is sometimes a bit too much.
00:45:59:00 - 00:46:30:01
Professor Pamela Snow
And the fact that there's, there's not a lot of monologues in everyday life. So the court context is very different in that regard. And the victim, the witness or the suspect doesn't have a lot of speaker rights in the way that we use that term in, in the linguistics literature. To refer to the fact that in, in an equal exchange, anybody can change the topic in the conversation.
00:46:30:03 - 00:47:19:00
Professor Pamela Snow
Excuse me, go back to a previous topic and so forth. That's not how it works. But those things, none of these things are explicitly stated. They are assumed they're kind of the hidden agenda of how courtroom discourse operates. So in the forensic context, specifically the things that can make communication skills, particularly vulnerable are all of the factors that you can see listed here that I think in the interests of time, I'm not going to go through, and labor point, but you can see there are many examples here of poor interviewing practice, that will result in, some degree of compromise, modes of communicative success.
00:47:19:00 - 00:47:45:13
Professor Pamela Snow
And ultimately, of course, can compromise the court process. Of this is just an example from my Twitter feed. Ruth Marchant, trains intermediaries, in the UK. And she sometimes tweets examples of things that have occurred in court. And this is a QC to a five year old over a live link who said, are you in school at the moment?
00:47:45:15 - 00:48:10:05
Professor Pamela Snow
And the five year old, said, no, I'm in this room with cameras so you can see me and I can see you. Very literal, honest interpretation of the question. And, the judge, trying to, discern whether the child knows the difference between, on the truth or a lie. If I told you my robes were green, would I be telling you the truth or a lie, child?
00:48:10:05 - 00:48:39:12
Professor Pamela Snow
Well, you might just be telling a mistake. So this goes to the mental representation part of language. That, at one level, we have the notion of truth or lie. But of course, the child has a mental representation for another dimension of a mental process that could be occurring in that context. And then we get language that is just ridiculously, complex.
00:48:39:12 - 00:48:59:01
Professor Pamela Snow
So this is from a court stenographer. Isn't it the case that when you said you knew X didn't want to do that, you said he'd said that he did want to. It's even hard to read. You didn't want him to that didn't want him to know. You didn't want him to. Now, this is from a court stenographer.
00:48:59:01 - 00:49:23:03
Professor Pamela Snow
So I guess we have to assume that it's, it's verbatim. But you can see that it's very convoluted. I found it hard to even read out because there aren't enough linguistic, kind of signposts for me to be making sense of it, let alone a vulnerable witness being able to process that. That's going to really text information processing, systems.
00:49:23:05 - 00:49:52:12
Professor Pamela Snow
So the key thing with language problems is that they are invisible. Children are adults with language problems. Language disorders don't have a barcode on their forehead that makes a noise when they enter the court. Language disorders masquerade as a raft of other factors that create disadvantage. They they masquerade as rudeness, indifference, poor motivation. They create a tendency to give quite minimalist responses.
00:49:52:23 - 00:50:21:05
Professor Pamela Snow
They make it hard for a child or an adult to keep up with banter. They create a, vulnerability to suggestibility and all of a compliance, with propositions that are put to them, particularly by a very verbally competent and perhaps slightly intimidating counsel in court. They might, masquerade as behavior disturbance, low IQ, or lack of genuineness and, authenticity.
00:50:21:07 - 00:50:56:18
Professor Pamela Snow
Language disorders make it hard for children or adults to do all of the things that you can see listed here. Share. Share a story. So that's providing an account considering listener perspective. So to make judgments about what the person who is asking them questions, what they might already know and what they need to know in order to fill an information gap, it can make it hard for them to use specific vocabulary to understand idiomatic, figurative language, to get a joke, and even just to understand that it was a joke.
00:50:57:09 - 00:51:28:17
Professor Pamela Snow
And not assume that, offense was intended and to be the kind of communicator who can share the load and share the heavy lifting in communication by correcting misunderstandings and, repairing little tears in the communication should they occur. So there's a range of everyday idiomatic expressions here that, children and adults with language disorders or intellectual disability will have trouble, potentially have trouble understanding.
00:51:28:17 - 00:51:57:05
Professor Pamela Snow
And people from other cultures may have trouble understanding these as well. So things that you can do, to remember this close connection between a vulnerable life and vulnerable communication skills. It doesn't take much at all to make communication skills vulnerable. The 15 year old, who's standing in front of you in court might be a five year old linguistically creating communication friendly spaces for everybody, regardless of age or disability.
00:51:57:14 - 00:52:28:17
Professor Pamela Snow
So thinking about noise, thinking about being at a similar level of eye contact, that's not necessarily possible in court, but it might be possible in other office spaces. Modifying your own communication style, using some of the strategies that you can see pointed. They're watching for inconsistencies. Being aware that asking a witness to explain something in their own words can actually be problematic for someone whose expressive language skills are poorer than their receptive language skills.
00:52:28:17 - 00:52:53:21
Professor Pamela Snow
So if you ask me to listen to something in French, which I studied for six years at school a very long time ago, I might pick up bits of it and understand bits of it, but if you ask me to then explain it in French, I'd be completely, stumped. And it's often the case that, receptive skills are a bit better than expressive skills.
00:52:53:21 - 00:53:17:23
Professor Pamela Snow
So when we ask people to explain something in their own words, we're potentially asking them to operate in a very vulnerable skill set, even though they may have understood certain components. So that's not a way to find out what someone has understood. Monitor the types of language that are used by others. Recognize that it's often easier for people to say, I don't know, than it is to try and explain.
00:53:17:23 - 00:53:46:10
Professor Pamela Snow
And sometimes we simply don't give people enough time to process the question, understand the question, and formulate their own, response. Minimizing your use of non-literal, idiomatic language, avoiding using pronouns such as he or she where the referent is unclear. So restate the referent. Restate the person's name to make that clear. Remember the impact of all of those physiological factors?
00:53:47:16 - 00:54:11:15
Professor Pamela Snow
Some, some people need to use an assistive device for communication device, and that needs to be accessible to them. Talk to carers about what works with respect to communication in the in the case of people with more obvious and severe disability, remember that children from homes with languages other than English is spoken may experience particular difficulties.
00:54:11:15 - 00:54:37:18
Professor Pamela Snow
They may have cultural and linguistic difficulties, and they may also have neuro disabilities as well. Speech problems don't equal, language or cognitive problems. So sometimes people have mechanical problems producing speech. But the cognitive and language hardware is actually, working pretty well. But it can create an impression of a greater degree of impairment than actually exists.
00:54:37:20 - 00:55:09:16
Professor Pamela Snow
Request an assessment by a speech pathologist if you're in any doubt. And remember that it's very easy to both over and underestimate a person's communication abilities. Okay. I like to, to, to use this analogy of, our secret weapon as, skilled, competent communication communicators. It's like when we have a dial that's got very, very fine gradations, and we can, make real time adjustments to communication according to a rate of what's happening.
00:55:09:18 - 00:55:38:04
Professor Pamela Snow
The person standing in front of you in court may have a communication dial that, has very, very few gradations because their communication skills, their repertoire may be so limited. And we need to consider that distance between our communication skills and the communication skills of the person standing in front of us in the court. Okay, I think I have gone, at least two time, if not a smidge over time.
00:55:39:03 - 00:56:06:19
Professor Pamela Snow
There's, a couple of slides with some, resources, where you can go to get reliable normative information in a developmental sense. And, this is a paper on, best practice interviewing practice, with children. This is an open access. No, that one's not open access, but I can provide it, to Liz so that she can provide it to you.
00:56:06:21 - 00:56:33:19
Professor Pamela Snow
This one's open access. That, just came out last year, so, I will stop sharing my screen. I think that's my. Yes. And then there's my contact details, and you can read some more about some of these concepts on my blog. If they, if you feel so inclined. So I will stop sharing my screen and thank you for your attention.
00:56:33:19 - 00:57:00:19
Professor Pamela Snow
I know I was through a lot of big concepts there quite quickly. I hope that, that's laid the groundwork, at least for when we get together, and interact in real time at the webinar. So thank you, and I'll look forward to engaging further with you all.