Predictive processing and developmental language disorder

Abstract

Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing – the anticipation of upcoming stimuli – as a dominant function of the brain. However, predictive processing does not currently feature in any explanatory account of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The purpose of this brief report is to show that prediction is an important aspect of sentence processing and comprehension among typically developing children, and to argue that deficits in prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of DLD. We review evidence consistent with the idea that syntax-based predictive processing may be deficient in children affected by DLD, as well as evidence identifying a plausible basis of this deficit. Finally, we consider whether prediction deficits may limit not only sentence processing and comprehension but also the development of syntactic awareness in children with DLD.

Prediction Cannot Be Directly Trained: An Extension to Jones and Westermann (2021)

“…In January 2021 we published a viewpoint article entitled 'Predictive processing and developmental language disorder' (DLD) in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (S. D. Jones & Westermann, 2021). In this article, our aim was to introduce the predictive processing framework to a perhaps unfamiliar readership, and to consider how this framework may help re-focus our understanding of the challenges facing children with language learning difficulties.…”

“…In our target article, we cited evidence that children with well-developed language skills implicitly anticipate the sorts of linguistic features that they later expect to hear, whether these features are acoustic-phonetic, lexical, syntactic, or semantic (Blank & Davis, 2016;Borovsky et al, 2012;Davis & Johnsrude, 2003;S. D. Jones & Westermann, 2021;Mani & Huettig, 2012;Sohoglu et al, 2012).…”

“…Where language develops more slowly, as it does in children diagnosed with DLD, the effective anticipation of upcoming speech will be necessarily compromised, leaving the child less well prepared to navigate the noise that characterizes natural speech and giving rise to apparently laboured language comprehension (Borovsky et al, 2012(Borovsky et al, , 2012Hestvik et al, 2022;Mani & Huettig, 2012). Rather than exploiting online anticipatory processing during exposure to the features of an unfolding sentence, a child with language learning difficulties PREDICTION CANNOT BE DIRECTLY TRAINED 2 may be relatively more dependent on post hoc sentence element integration and ambiguity resolution (S. D. Jones & Westermann, 2021).…”