Syntactic Structural Assignment in Brazilian Portuguese-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Purpose In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses. Method Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4–l 0;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (±3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task. Results Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition. Conclusion The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension.

Syntactic comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment, autism or Down syndrome

“…These results and previous findings (Marton & Schwartz, 2003) suggested a greater influence of linguistic complexity than sentence length on working memory performance. Further supporting this claim, Fortunato-Tavares and colleagues (2012) found a clear influence of working memory (addition of one PP causing a greater distance between reflexive and its antecedent) on the syntactic assignment of reflexives of children with SLI and their age-matched controls.…”

“…The SLI group consisted of a subsample of a previously published study (Fortunato-Tavares et al, 2012). They had all been diagnosed by a group of Speech-Language Pathologists as specific language impaired.…”

“…There are conflicting findings across languages and across clinical populations regarding clitic deficits. Although French children with SLI appear to have no deficits in comprehending reflexive clitics (Gruter, 2005; Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut, & Gérard, 1998) deficits have been observed in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with SLI for reflexives (Fortunato-Tavares et al, 2012) and in Greek-speaking children’s comprehension of general clitics (Terzi, Marinis, Francis, & Kotsopoulou, 2014). Although children with TLD have less difficulty with reflexive clitics than with other clitics (Costa & Lobo, 2007; Jakubowicz & Rigaut, 2000; Silva, 2008), in the current study we will be able to examine whether the presence of clitics posed an additional challenge.…”

“…The degree of language impairment was extreme in these children, with an age range (9;0–12;0) that differed substantially from the very young language-matched controls (5;0–9;0). A different study (Fortunato-Tavares et al, 2012) that avoided some of the limitations of the studies by van der Lely and colleagues found that Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with SLI (8;0–12;0) do exhibit deficits in syntactic assignment for reflexives, but, as indicated by the error patterns, these deficits are not limited to errors in antecedent assignment, as predicted by theories such as HOD (Cromer, 1978) and its successor, the deficit in CCG hypothesis (van der Lely, 1998). In contrast, a different study reported that Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI (9;0–13;0 years) have deficits only in some syntactic dependencies, not including the reflexive assignment (Novogrodsky & Friedmann, 2010).…”

Compreensão de ambiguidade em crianças com Transtorno Específico de Linguagem e Fala e Transtorno do Espectro Autista

“…Regarding Specific Language Impairment, studies refer to the inability to structure language and its phonological, syntactic and semantic subsystems, with less emphasis on pragmatics, whose alteration must be caused by a deficient linguistic basis and, therefore, is considered as a secondary flaw (6,26) . The acquisition of language in children with SLI can occur in an atypical, slow and hierarchical way, starting with the semantic class of concrete representation nouns, which is the most easily acquired grammatical category (27)(28)(29) .…”