The development of sentence-interpretation strategies in monolingual German-learning children with and without specific language impairment

Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentrated on the role of case marking and word order in typically developing children. This paper compares, the performance of German-learning children with language impairment (age 4-6 years) and without language impairment (aged 2-6, 8-9 years) in two experiments that systematically vary the cues animacy, case marking; word-order, and subject-verb agreement. The two experiments differ with regard to the choice of case marking: in the first it is distinct but in the second it is neutralized. The theoretical framework is the competition model developed by Bates and Mac Whinney and their collaborators, a variant of the parallel distributed processing models. It is hypothesized that children of either population first appreciate the cue animacy that can be processed locally, that is, "on the spot," before they turn to more distributed cues leading ultimately up to subject-verb agreement, which presupposes the comparison of various constituents before an interpretation can be established. Thus agreement is more "costly" in processing than animacy or the (more) local cue initial NP. In experiment I with unambiguous case markers it is shown that the typically developing children proceed from animacy to the nominative (predominantly in coalition with the initial NP) to agreement, while in the second experiment with ambiguous case markers these children turn from animacy to the initial NP and then to agreement. The impaired children also progress from local to distributed cues. Yet, in contrast to the control group, they do not acknowledge the nominative in coalition with the initial NP in the first experiment but only in support of agreement. However, although they do not seem to appreciate distinct case markers to any large extent in the first experiment, they are irritated if such distinctions are lacking: in experiment II all impaired children turn to. animacy (some in coalition with the initial NP and/or particular word orders). In the discussion, the relationship between short-term memory and processing as well as the relationship between production and comprehension of case markers and agreement are addressed. Further research is needed to explore in more detail "cue costs" in sentence comprehension

Flexible predictions during listening comprehension: Speaker reliability affects anticipatory processes

Available online 9 October 2019During listening comprehension, the identification of individual words can be strongly influenced by properties of the preceding context. While sentence context can facilitate both behavioral and neural responses, it is unclear whether these effects can be attributed to the pre-activation of lexico-semantic features or the facilitated integration of contextually congruent words. Moreover, little is known about how statistics of the broader language environment, or information about the current speaker, might shape these facilitation effects. In the present study, we measured neural responses to predictable and unpredictable words as participants listened to sentences for comprehension. Critically, we manipulated the reliability of each speaker’s utterances, such that individual speakers either tended to complete sentences with words that were highly predictable (reliable speaker) or with words that were unpredictable but still plausible (unreliable speaker). As expected, the amplitude of the N400 was reduced for locally predictable words, but, critically, these context effects were also modulated by speaker identity. Sentences from a reliable speaker showed larger facilitation effects with an earlier onset, suggesting that listeners engaged in enhanced anticipatory processing when a speaker’s behavior was more predictable. This finding suggests that listeners can implicitly track the reliability of predictive cues in their environment and use these statistics to adaptively regulate predictive processing.This research was partially funded by NSF (1024003) and NIH (R21 11601946)

“Whatdunit?” Developmental changes in children\u27s syntactically based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order

Aim 1 of this study was to examine the developmental changes in typically developing English-speaking children’s syntactically-based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order. Aim 2 was to determine the psychometric standing of the novel sentence interpretation task developed for this study, as we wish to use it later with children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children listened to semantically implausible sentences in which noun animacy and the natural affordance between the nouns were removed, thus controlling for event probability. Using this novel “whatdunit?” agent selection task, 256 children 7-11 years listened to two structures with canonical word order and two with non-canonical word order. After each sentence, children selected as quickly as possible the picture of the noun they believed was “doing the action.” Children interpreted sentences with canonical word order with greater accuracy and speed than those with non-canonical word order. Older children (AgeM = 10:8) were more accurate and faster than younger children (AgeM = 8:1) across all sentence forms. Both older and younger children demonstrated similar error patterns across sentence type. The “whatdunit?” task also proved to have strong validity and reliability, making it suitable for studies with children with SLI

Prediction as memory retrieval: timing and mechanisms

In our target article [Chow, W., Smith, C., Lau, E., & Phillips, C. (2015). A “bag-of-arguments” mechanism for initial verb predictions. Language, Cognition & Neuroscience. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1066832], we investigated the predictions that comprehenders initially make about an upcoming verb as they read and provided evidence that they are sensitive to the arguments’ lexical meaning but not their structural roles. Here we synthesise findings from our work with other studies that show that verb predictions are sensitive to the arguments’ roles if more time is available for prediction. We content that prediction involves computations that may require differing amounts of time. Further, we argue that prediction can be usefully framed as a memory retrieval problem, linking prediction to independently well-understood memory mechanisms in language processing. We suggest that the delayed impact of argument roles on verb predictions may reflect a mismatch between the format of linguistic cues and target event memories. We clarify points of agreement and disagreement with the commentaries, and explain why memory access mechanisms can account for the time course of prediction

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking 6- to 8-year old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativisation. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically-appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extra-linguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases

Morphosyntactic cues to verb comprehension for typically developing toddlers and children with specific language impairment

Function morphemes assist typically developing (TD) children in segmenting speech, identifying syntactic categories, and mapping meaning onto words, yet function morphemes pose particular difficulty for children with specific language impairment(SLI). This investigation examined the effect of morphosyntactic context on verb comprehension for two groups of telegraphic speakers at the same expressive language stage as measured by mean length of utterance (MLU). The following two research questions were posed. Do young telegraphic speakers show increased verb comprehension given sentences containing a grammatical morpheme compared with sentences containing an im grammatical morpheme, a nonsense syllable, or no morpheme?Do children with SLI differ in verb comprehension for sentences with varying morphosyntactic contexts when compared with younger, MLU-matched TD children?Two MLU-equivalent groups participated, 16 TD children (age = 26 mos.) and 16 children with SLI (age = 48 mos.). Similar to Gerken and McIntosh (1993), a picture selection task was used to test verb comprehension in 4 contexts: grammatical auxiliary(Who is pushing?); omitted auxiliary (Who Φ pushing?); ungrammatical morpheme(Who in pushing?); and nonsense syllable (Who id pushing?). Auditory stimuli were digitally edited to control duration and naturalness.Experimental manipulation of “is” did not result in significant differences across morpheme contexts for either group. Verb comprehension probably was supported by verb lengthening associated with utterance-final position. Verbs also were marked by morpheme -ing. This morphosyntactic cue (i.e., morpheme -ing) may have aided verb comprehension regardless of auxiliary “is” variation. Findings suggest function morphemes are only one among many input cues available to language learners during comprehension, including prosodic, phonological, and contextual cues.Children with SLI had significantly higher verb comprehension than ID childrenacross morpheme contexts. Group differences favoring children with SLI(e.g., chronological age and receptive language) may explain this finding. Despitemorpheme anomalies, children with SLI demonstrated verb comprehension when the input cues were redundant and correlated with meaning. Discrepancies between these results and report of a grammaticality effect by McNamara, Carter, McIntosh, and Gerken(1998) are relevant to theories of SLI regarding limited processing capacity and memory limitations

Sentence Processing within the Competition Model

The Competition Model was developed to account for sentence processing as well as language acquisition (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989). Based on lexical functionalism, the model assumes that language processing is an interactive process of form-function mappings mediated by competition and cooperation among lexical items. It also draws on connectionist modeling, and thus stresses the importance of frequency and the information value of linguistic input. The purpose of this paper is to review the Competition Model through a brief discussion of its main principles and empirical studies. The first part of the paper briefly reviews two major theoretical approaches in sentence processing research. In the next section, the Competition Model is presented with its theoretical background, principles, and predictions. Then, empirical studies investigating sentence processing within the model will be discussed. Finally, the paper will conclude with a discussion of methodological issues