CAREER: The Relationship among Phonology, Syntax & the Lexicon in Specific Language Impairment

9875168 Stromswold一些看起来正常的孩子莫名其妙地在语言习得上有困难。 特殊性语言障碍（SLI）是指在语言产生和/或理解方面出现的严重发育迟缓，这种发育迟缓似乎不是由于听力损失、智力迟钝、运动缺陷、神经或精神障碍或缺乏语言接触所致。 本研究将对正常发育儿童和SLI儿童进行三种类型的研究：1）纵向自发言语样本分析; 2）横向诱发言语样本分析; 3）语音、句法和词汇复杂度系统变化的模仿句子分析。 通过对这些数据的仔细分析，我们将解决以下问题：* SLI中语言缺陷的性质是什么？* 语言的某些成分在多大程度上是（例如，句法、音韵、词汇）相对于SLI中的其他语言而言是否有所保留？ * 成绩因素在多大程度上对SLI儿童的缺陷起作用？ SLI和正常儿童在语言任务上的表现随着表现负荷的增加而下降到什么程度？* SLI和正常儿童是否有一个单一的（有限的）资源池来完成所有的语言任务，或者语言的每个子成分都有自己的专用资源？在语言的一个领域增加的表现负荷是否会导致该领域或其他语言领域的表现下降？

9875168StromswoldSome apparently normal children inexplicably have difficulty acquiringlanguage. Specific language impairment (SLI) is the term for severedevelopmental delays in the production and/or comprehension oflanguage that do not seem to be due to hearing loss, mentalretardation, motor deficits, neurological or psychiatric disorders, orlack of exposure to language. In this project, three types of studieswill be conducted on normally-developing and SLI children: 1) analysesof longitudinal spontaneous speech samples; 2) analyses ofcross-sectional elicited speech samples; and 3) analyses of imitatedsentences that systematically vary in phonological, syntactic andlexical complexity. Through careful analyses of these data, we willaddress the following questions:* What is the nature of the linguistic deficit(s) in SLI?* To what extent are some components of language (e.g., syntax, phonology, lexicon) spared relative to others in SLI? * To what extent do performance factors play a role in SLI children's deficits? To what extent does SLI and normal children's performance on language tasks degrade as performance load increases?* Do SLI and normal children have a single (limited) pool of performance resources for all language tasks, or does each subcomponent of language have its own dedicated resources? Does increased performance load in one area of language lead to decreased performance in just that area or in other areas of language as well?