Poster #48 - The Influence of Developmental Language Disorders on Sentence Processing in Children

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Developmental Disabilities

Integrative Statement

Children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) show lexical deficits (Sheng & McGregor, 2010) and slower speed of processing (Montgomery, 2000) in sentence comprehension compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Other studies, using eye-tracking, have suggested that children with DLD (like typical adults and children) can quickly integrate semantic information across multiple words to predict highly expected sentence endings (e.g. when hearing The pirate chases the… listeners gaze towards an image of a SHIP; Borovsky et al., 2013). Interestingly, children with DLD, unlike typical peers and adults, do not generate graded expectations for less-likely sentence outcomes (i.e. typical children fixate to a smaller degree to a chase-able alternative, but not those with DLD). We therefore explore whether this group difference in graded lexico-semantic activation during sentence processing leads to difficulties in processing unexpected sentence endings in children with DLD.
Children (aged 4;4-5;10) with DLD (n=9) listened to simple SVO sentence containing an informative agent and verb, followed by an object. Participants’ eye-movements were simultaneously recorded towards an array of four objects that varied in their relationship to the spoken agent and action (e.g. Agent+Action-Related, Action-Related, Agent-Related, and Unrelated). One-third of the sentences contained endings that were not highly expected, though varied in their relation to the sentential action. Unexpected endings were either (1) Action-Related, in that they plausibly coordinated with the verb (e.g. The pirate chases the cat) or (2) Unrelated, where the ending did not coordinate with the verb (e.g. The pirate chases the bones). The task was to select the picture that best matched with the sentence. Across all versions of the study, pictures were rotated across stimuli in order to yield a completely balanced within-subjects design. We asked whether looks generated to the target object in each of the two experimental conditions (Action-Related and Unrelated).
Our preliminary results highlight differences in looks to the named object in the Action-Related and Unrelated conditions as the critical sentence unfolded (Figure 1). A comparison of mean fixation proportions towards the target from target word onset to offset indicated that children with DLD looked more towards the target in the Action-Related vs. Unrelated condition, t(8) = 3.49, p < 0.01, d = 1.34. This pattern suggests that preschool-aged children with DLD show graded activation for action-related items compared to unrelated items, contrary to results in older adolescents with DLD. Ongoing testing in an age-matched group of typically developing children will seek to directly compare lexico-semantic activation during sentence processing across children with and without DLD. Even without data from this comparison group, our results yield novel insights into the dynamics of sentence processing in preschoolers with DLD. Specifically, the graded differences in expectations for alternative semantic possibilities highlight the promising possibility that children with DLD can override prior expectations to learn in language surrounding novel situations.

Authors

• Michelle Indarjit, Purdue University
  Presenting Author

• Arielle Borovsky, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author