Normal and Language‐impaired children's use of reference: syntactic versus pragmatic processing

Abstract

The present study investigates children's syntactic and pragmatic processing when specifying referents presented in short video clips. Within Relevance theory, the assumption of 'optimal relevance' implies that utterances are intended to involve the least processing effort on the part of the listener. In the present context, lexically specified NPs are assumed to be more in line with optimal relevance than pronouns. Subjects were 48 normally developing children aged 3;4-8;10 and 30 SLI children aged 5;1-8;9, divided into a low and a normal MLU group. Children's responses were coded according to levels of pragmatic processing and syntactic positions. Normally developing children's referent specifications were found to be increasingly relevant with increasing age. Differences between SLI and normal children were only found for the low MLU group with SLI who used fewer pronouns than the younger children, thereby showing that syntactic limitations alone cannot account for children's specification of referents.

Exploring the Utility of Narrative Analysis in Diagnostic Decision Making: Picture-Bound Reference, Elaboration, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

“…As relatively complex forms, it is more likely that pronominal forms will be used in error by children in this age group (cf. Schelletter & Leinonen, 2003;van Der Lely, 1997;Wigglesworth, 1997;Wong & Johnston, 2004). This may be seen in the relatively poor specificity of PR in Table 4.…”

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

“…Our fi ndings point in the direction that children with SLI and age-matched typically developing children prefer to produce less explicit expressions for subjects than for objects. They treat subjects as more accessible than objects (see also Schelletter & Leinonen, 2003). What might have contributed to this result is the fact that the elicitation question in our experiment constrained the targeted grammatical role of the referent.…”

“…For example, children with SLI have been shown to prefer lexical NPs for (re)introducing referents just as chronological-age-matched typically developing children do (de Weck & Jullien, 2013;Norbury & Bishop, 2003;van der Lely, 1997), and they produce pronouns for maintaining reference to previously mentioned referents (Norbury & Bishop, 2003;van der Lely, 1997). Children with SLI also appear to show a sensitivity to the grammatical role of the referent (Schelletter & Leinonen, 2003).…”

The effects of expansions, questions and cloze procedures on children’s conversational skills

“…Although the absence of relevant responses was low following all three techniques, it was significantly lower following EA as compared to both EQ and EC. While non-relevant responses are hard to interpret, they may reflect a range of possibilities including failure of comprehension (Leinonen, Letts et al, 2000), inattention (Leonard, Milich et al, 2011), or difficulty in referring accurately (Schelletter and Leinonen, 2003).…”