Sensitivity to Morphological Cues in Children with Specific Language Impairment

有特定语言障碍的儿童对形态线索的敏感性

• 批准号: 8676778
• 负责人: Laurence Baker Leonard
• 金额: $ 23.1万
• 依托单位: PURDUE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-06-10 至 2016-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8676778
• 关键词: Accounting; Adult; Age; Agreement; Canis familiaris; Child; Comprehension; Crying; Cues; Dependency; Development; Early Intervention; Early identification; Eating; Exhibits; Eye; Failure; Felis catus; Hearing; Intelligence Tests; Language; Learning; Linguistics; Literature; Measures; Methodology; Methods; Morphology; Nervous System Trauma; Nursery Schools; Persons; Procedures; Running; Sensitivity and Specificity; Source; Speech; Structure; Symptoms; Testing; autism spectrum disorder; base; diagnostic accuracy; elementary school; gaze; girls; grasp; language comprehension; peer; prevent; public health relevance; research study; specific language impairment; stem; successful intervention; theories; tool

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show serious limitations in grammatical ability. An especially common manifestation of this grammatical weakness is the inconsistent use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement (e.g., -s in runs and is in The girl is crying). This inconsistency serves as a reliable means of distinguishing children with SLI from their typically developing peers. Although the details of this inconsistent use have been well described in the scientific literature, the factors responsible for this hallmark symptom are far from clear. This lack of understanding has prevented the development of successful intervention methods for ameliorating this problem. In this application, we propose that tense and agreement inconsistency stems from these children's failure to understand the structural dependencies that hold within a wide variety of sentences that appear in the input, and, as a result, this inconsistency does not require an assumption of a separate learning mechanism that has gone awry. The common feature of the problematic sentences is that a nonfinite subject-verb sequence appears late in the sentence, and is allowed because finiteness is expressed in a verb form that appears earlier in the sentence. Examples include We saw the girl/her running, Is the girl/she crying?, and Did the girl/she finish her breakfast? As a result of the children's failure to grasp these structural dependencies, they often extract nonfinite subject-verb sequences (e.g., The girl/her running, The girl/she crying) and use these inappropriate forms as the basis for generating new utterances with the same structure. Although emerging evidence suggests that these children do, in fact, extract nonfinite subject-verb sequences from larger structures, we have needed a procedure that allows us to test whether these children are sensitive to the relationship between early-appearing finite forms in the sentence and later-appearing nonfinite subject-verb sequences. Through application of the looking-while-listening paradigm, we can now begin to test this proposal. In four experiments, we will examine the shifts in eye gaze of preschool-age children with SLI and their typically developing peers as they hear questions while looking at pairs of pictures on a video screen. We expect that typically developing children will orient toward the target picture on the basis of early-appearing finite information (e.g., shifting towarda picture of a plural referent upon hearing the auxiliary are in Are the nice little cats eating?). I contrast, we expect that children with SLI will fail to make use of this information and instead orient toward the target picture only after the plural noun (e.g., cats) is heard. Furthermore, we expect that children's sensitivity or insensitivity to this early-appearing finite information will serve as a significant predictor of their consistency/inconsistency in using tense and agreement finite forms in their own speech. Findings that support this proposal would have significant implications for prevailing theory and suggest a wholly different approach to treating this persistent grammatical problem in children with SLI.

描述（由申请人提供）：许多具有特定语言障碍的儿童（SLI）在语法能力上显示出严重的局限性。这种语法弱点的一个特别普遍的表现是对标志着时态和一致的语法语素的不一致（例如，在奔跑中的 - 且在女孩中哭泣）。这种不一致是将SLI与通常发展的同龄人区分开的可靠手段。尽管这种不一致用途的细节在科学文献中得到了很好的描述，但这些因素 负责这种标志性症状远非明确。缺乏理解阻止了成功减轻此问题的成功干预方法。在此应用中，我们提出时态和一致性的不一致源于这些孩子未能理解输入中出现各种句子中的结构依赖性，因此，这种不一致不需要假设一个单独的学习机制，而这已经出现了。有问题的句子的共同特征是句子中出现了非精彩的主语 - 动词序列，并且由于有限性以动词形式表达，该句子以句子中早期出现的动词形式表示。例子包括我们看到了女孩/她跑步，女孩/她在哭吗？由于孩子们未能掌握这些结构性依赖性，他们经常提取无限的主题 - 动词序列（例如，女孩/她的跑步，女孩/她哭泣），并使用这些不适当的形式作为产生具有相同结构的新话语的基础。尽管新兴的证据表明，这些孩子实际上是从较大结构中提取非限定的主体 - 动词序列，但我们需要一种程序，使我们能够测试这些孩子是否对句子中早期出现的有限形式和后来的非菲斯主体 - 主体 - 动词序列之间的关系敏感。通过应用查看范围的范式，我们现在可以开始测试该建议。在四个实验中，我们将研究患有SLI的学龄前儿童及其通常正在发展的同龄人的眼睛的转变，同时在视频屏幕上查看一对图片时。我们希望通常，成长的孩子会根据早期有限的信息来定位目标图片（例如，在听到辅助时，朝着复数引用的图片转移到图片中，是好猫的饮食吗？）。我对比了，我们预计SLI的孩子将无法使用此信息，而仅在听到复数名词（例如猫）之后才能对目标图片进行定向。此外，我们预计儿童对这种早期有限信息的敏感性或不敏感性将 在他们自己的演讲中使用时态和协议有限的形式，可以作为其一致性/不一致的重要预测指标。支持该建议的发现将对流行理论产生重大影响，并提出一种完全不同的方法来治疗SLI儿童的持续语法问题。