“Whatdunit?” Sentence Comprehension Abilities of Children With SLI: Sensitivity to Word Order in Canonical and Noncanonical Structures

Abstract

Purpose With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared the comprehension error patterns of the groups. Method Using a “Whatdunit” agent selection task, 117 children with SLI and 117 TD children (ages 7:0–11:11, years:months) propensity matched on age, gender, mother's education, and family income pointed to the picture that best represented the agent in semantically implausible canonical structures (subject–verb–object, subject relative) and noncanonical structures (passive, object relative). Results The SLI group performed worse than the TD group across sentence types. TD children demonstrated developmental improvement across each sentence type, but children with SLI showed improvement only for canonical sentences. Both groups chose the object noun as agent significantly more often than the noun appearing in a prepositional phrase. Conclusions In the absence of semantic–pragmatic cues, comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences by children with SLI is limited, with noncanonical sentence comprehension being disproportionately limited. The children's ability to make proper semantic role assignments to the noun arguments in sentences, especially noncanonical, is significantly hindered.

Structural Relationship Between Cognitive Processing and Syntactic Sentence Comprehension in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…Children were classified as DLD if their mean composite language z score on their three lowest of the four subtests was at or below −1 SD, which is consistent with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) definition of language disorder, multidimensional systems for defining DLD (Leonard, 2014;Tager-Flusberg & Cooper, 1999), and other studies (Conti-Ramsden, Ullman, & Lum, 2015;Montgomery et al, 2017). Tomblin, Records, and Zhang (1996) reported that the average language z score for the children identified with the EpiSLI model was −1.14, and approximately 5% of their specific language impairment group had average z scores between −1 and 0.…”

“…It may also be that we picked up on a developmental issue. Even though these same TD children showed developmental improvement in noncanonical sentence comprehension, the older children's performance was still nowhere near that of adults (60% vs. 87%; Montgomery et al, 2017).…”

“…Within the DLD literature, studies by Dick, Wulfeck, Krupa-Kwiatkowski, and Bates (2004) and Evans (Evans, 2002;Evans & MacWhinney, 1999) are notable as being the few studies to try to disentangle the influences of different cues (i.e., word order and animacy) on DLD sentence comprehension. Following this line of research, Montgomery, Gillam, Evans, and Sergeev (2017) offer some clarity on the use of a single cue-word order-to guide comprehension in school-age (7-to 11-yearold) children with DLD. Children were asked to comprehend highly implausible sentences, which forced them to rely solely on word order to comprehend the sentences.…”

“…Children's ability to comprehend who did what to whom was assessed using our "Whatdunit?" agent selection task (Montgomery et al, 2017). Children listened to implausible sentences and selected the agent of the sentence by touching the image of the agent noun from an array of three images presented immediately after the sentence.…”

Statistical Learning in the Visuomotor Domain and Its Relation to Grammatical Proficiency in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Conceptual Replication and Meta-Analysis

“…It is debatable whether all these different measures tap into a similar underlying construct and whether differences in task demands modulate the strength of the correlation with serial reaction time task performance. For future studies it may thus be interesting to focus on more specific grammatical constructs, preferable grammatical structures that, similarly to the serial reaction time task, require sensitivity to sequential information (e.g., children's sensitivity to and comprehension of (non)canonical word order; Montgomery et al, 2017).…”