scholarly journals Deficits in the Use of Verb Bias Information in Real-Time Processing by College Students With Developmental Language Disorder

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica E. Hall ◽  
Amanda Owen Van Horne ◽  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
Thomas A. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Verb Bias ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
Mouse Movements ◽  
Experimental Trials

Purpose This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) showed similar sensitivity to verb bias information during real-time sentence processing as typically developing (TD) peers. Method Seventeen college students with DLD and 16 TD college students participated in a mouse-tracking experiment that utilized the visual world paradigm to examine real-time sentence processing. In experimental trials, participants chose 1 of 2 pictured interpretations of a sentence. Measures of interest were the choice of interpretation and the amount of competition from the unchosen picture as measured by mouse curvature. Results Choice of interpretation and mouse movements by college students with DLD suggested less sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers. Conclusion College students with DLD showed less evidence of sensitivity to verb bias information than their TD peers in this task. Their performance may reflect the use of compensatory processing strategies and may be related to poor comprehension abilities often observed in this population.

scholarly journals Predictive Processing and Developmental Language Disorder

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Samuel David Jones ◽  
Gert Westermann
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Syntactic Awareness ◽  
Feedback Cycle ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Neurophysiological Data ◽  
The Brain

Purpose Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing—the anticipation of upcoming percepts—as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental language disorder (DLD). Method We evaluate behavioral and neurophysiological data relevant to the theme of prediction in early typical and atypical language acquisition and processing. Results Poor syntactic awareness—attributable, in part, to an underlying statistical learning deficit—is likely to impede syntax-based predictive processing in children with DLD, conferring deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. Furthermore, there may be a feedback cycle in which poor syntactic awareness impedes children's ability to anticipate upcoming percepts, and this, in turn, makes children unable to improve their syntactic awareness on the basis of prediction error signals. Conclusion This article offers a refocusing of theory on sentence processing and comprehension deficits in DLD, from a difficulty in processing and integrating perceived syntactic features to a difficulty in anticipating what is coming next.

scholarly journals Distributional Learning in College Students With Developmental Language Disorder

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (11) ◽  
pp. 3270-3283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Hall ◽  
Amanda Owen Van Horne ◽  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
Thomas Farmer
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Category Membership ◽  
Artificial Grammar ◽  
Artificial Language ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Distributional Information ◽  
Distributional Learning

Purpose This study examined whether college students with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership in a way similar to their typically developing (TD) peers. Method Seventeen college students with DLD and 17 TD college students participated in this task. We used an artificial grammar in which certain combinations of words never occurred during training. At test, participants had to use knowledge of category membership to determine which combinations were allowable in the grammar, even though they had not been heard. Results College students with DLD performed similarly to TD peers in distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical combinations. Conclusion Differences in ratings between grammatical and ungrammatical items in this task suggest that college students with DLD can form grammatical categories from novel input and more broadly use distributional information.

Negative scope, temporality, fixedness, and right- and left-branching

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsuyoshi Ono ◽  
Sandra Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Word Order ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Time Processing ◽  
Processing Strategies

Abstract ‘Negative scope’ concerns what it is that is negated in an utterance with a negative morpheme. With English and Japanese conversational data, we show that for an English speaker, calculating negative scope requires that recipients incrementally keep track of all the material in the clause that follows the negative morpheme, which comes early in the clause. In contrast, the negative morpheme comes late in the clause in Japanese; thus it would seem that recipients need to hold in memory all the material in the clause preceding the negative until the negative morpheme is produced. Several features of Japanese grammar, however, suggest that this characterization is not accurate. We argue that prosody, grammar, cognition, processing, and fixedness all interact with the grammar of clause organization to afford quite different real-time processing strategies for calculating the assignment of negative scope in languages with different ‘word order’ norms.

scholarly journals Syntactic Gender Agreement Processing on Direct-Object Clitics by Spanish-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from ERP

Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Paloma Roa-Rojas ◽  
John Grinstead ◽  
Juan Silva-Pereyra ◽  
Thalía Fernández ◽  
Mario Rodríguez-Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Processing Technique ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Anterior Negativity ◽  
Gender Features

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging evidence of this deficit can be found. In particular, we use the real-time processing technique of event-related brain potentials (ERP) with direct-object clitic pronouns in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Our participants include 15 six-year-old Mexican Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically developing, age-matched (TD) children. Auditory sentences that matched or did not match the gender features of antecedents represented in pictures were employed as stimuli in a visual–auditory gender agreement task. Gender-agreement violations were associated with an enhanced anterior negativity between 250 and 500 ms post-target onset in the TD children group. In contrast, children with DLD showed no such effect. This absence of the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect suggests weaker lexical representation of morphosyntactic gender features and/or non-adult-like morphosyntactic gender feature checking for the DLD children. We discuss the relevance of these findings for theoretical accounts of DLD. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of syntactic agreement processing and language disorders.

scholarly journals Predictive processing and developmental language disorder

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel David Jones ◽  
Gert Westermann
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Syntactic Awareness ◽  
Feedback Cycle ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Neurophysiological Data ◽  
The Brain

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing – the anticipation of upcoming percepts – as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We evaluate behavioural and neurophysiological data relevant to the theme of prediction in early typical and atypical language acquisition and processing. Results: Poor syntactic awareness – attributable in part to an underlying statistical learning deficit – is likely to impede syntax-based predictive processing in children with DLD, conferring deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. Furthermore, there may be a feedback cycle in which poor syntactic awareness impedes children’s ability to anticipate upcoming percepts, and this in turn makes children unable to improve their syntactic awareness on the basis of prediction error signals. Conclusion: This article offers a re-focusing of theory on sentence processing and comprehension deficits in DLD, from a difficulty in processing and integrating perceived syntactic features, to a difficulty in anticipating what is coming next.

Real time comprehension of Spanish articles in children with developmental language disorder: Empirical evidence from eye movements

2020 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 106027
Author(s):  
Spyros Christou ◽  
Ernesto Guerra ◽  
Carmen Julia Coloma ◽  
Llorenç Andreu Barrachina ◽  
Claudia Araya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder

How language learners comprehend and produce language in real time

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-74
Author(s):  
Gary Libben
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Show Evidence ◽  
Dual Mechanism

This paper does a fine job of advancing discussion concerning a question that is indeed quite underrepresented in the literature, that is, how language learners comprehend and produce language in real time. The paper is firmly rooted in the dual mechanism approach to language processing and takes as its starting point the assumption that normal adult processing is characterized by two systems, one that is lexically based and one that is essentially combinatorial. The authors cite evidence that both first language (L1) learners and adult native speakers show evidence of dual mechanism processing and that, in particular, children's sentence processing shows early reliance on structure-based interpretation and less ability to employ lexical/pragmatic information in the resolution of language ambiguity. One way to view this preference is that L1 learners might know, broadly speaking, considerably more about their language than they do about the world in which they live. Adult second language (L2) learners might be said to be in exactly the opposite situation. It is therefore hardly surprising that adult L2 speakers rely strongly on lexical/pragmatic cues in sentence processing. In the early stages of adult L2 acquisition, the demands of real-time processing make use of such nonsyntactic inference crucial. The question that strikes me as key is whether, as L2 speakers become more proficient, they are weaned from this reliance such that their processing reflects the interaction between syntactic and lexical processing that is characteristic of adult native speakers. When and if they do, we could say that their L2 processing is, both internally and externally, nativelike.

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