Time-related grammatical use by children with SLI across languages: Beyond tense

Neural Correlates of Telicity in Spanish-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

BACKGROUND

It is broadly acknowledged that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show verb-related limitations. While most previous studies have focused on tense, the mastery of lexical aspect-particularly telicity-has not been the primary focus of much research. Lexical aspect refers to whether an action has a defined endpoint (telic verbs) or not (atelic verbs).

OBJECTIVE

This study investigates the effect of telicity on verb recognition in Chilean children with DLD compared to their typically developing (TD) peers using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique.

METHOD

The research design is a mixed factorial design with between-group factors of 2 (DLD/TD) and within-group factors of 2 (telic/atelic verbs) and 2 (coherent/incoherent sentences). The participants were 36 school-aged children (18 DLD, 18 TD) aged 7 to 7 years and 11 months. The task required subjects to listen to sentences that either matched or did not match an action in a video, with sentences including telic or atelic verbs.

RESULTS

The study found notable differences between groups in how they processed verbs (N400 and post-N400 components) and direct objects (N400 and P600 components).

CONCLUSIONS

Children with DLD struggled to differentiate telic and atelic verbs, potentially because they employed overgeneralization strategies consistent with the Event Structural Bootstrapping model.

Using a word association task to investigate semantic depth in swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder

We examined word associations in Swedish children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Furthermore, the study aimed to explore the dimensions of vocabulary knowledge (breadth, depth, and fluency) in these children. Fifty children (15 DLD and 35 TD) participated in the study, aged six to nine years. This age span is commonly associated with substantial lexical reorganisation, by some referred to as the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. Fifty items from the Kent-Rosanoff list were used to elicit word associations (say the first word that comes to mind). Word associations were coded as paradigmatic (lion-tiger), syntagmatic (chair-sit), phonological (moon-poon), and other/no answer (foot-hello/bed- -). A semantic depth score (paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations) was calculated and analysed. The children with DLD showed significantly lower semantic depth scores than their TD peers, in line with previous research in English-speaking children. However, the vocabulary dimensions were uniformly affected for the DLD group, contradicting previous findings of semantic depth as a particular area of weakness in this group.

Specific language impairment in a morphologically complex agglutinative Indian language-Kannada

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) remains an underinvestigated disorder in morphologically complex agglutinative languages such as Kannada. Currently, only a few case reports are available on SLI in Dravidian languages. The morphological complexity inherent to Dravidian languages such as Kannada provides a potential avenue to verify one of the two prevailing accounts of SLI: the morphological richness theory and CGC (Computational Grammatical Complexity) hypothesis. While the previous theory predicts the relatively spared performance of children with SLI (CwSLI) on syntactic morphology in morphologically complex languages, the latter predicts a diametrically opposite performance. Data from a group of 15 Kannada-speaking CwSLI supported the morphological richness theory, and further revealed five distinct profiles of SLI. The results of this study reflected that CwSLI learning the agglutinative language (Kannada) as compared with language-matched children without SLI, displayed some shared deficits (e.g., in phonological processing on a non-word repetition task) with CwSLI learning English. However, CwSLI learning the morphosyntactically rich language Kannada differed remarkably from English-learning CwSLI by not showing deficits in syntactic morphology relative to language-matched peers (e.g., PNG, verb, tense, case, and pronoun).