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

一些表面上正常的孩子在学习语言方面莫名其妙地有困难。特殊语言障碍（SLI）是指在语言表达和/或理解方面出现严重的发育迟缓，而这种发育迟缓似乎不是由听力损失、智力迟钝、运动缺陷、神经或精神障碍或缺乏语言接触造成的。本项目将对正常发育儿童和特殊语言障碍儿童进行三种类型的研究：1)纵向自发语音样本分析；2)横断面引出语音样本分析；3)分析在语音、句法和词汇复杂性上有系统变化的模仿句子。通过对这些数据的仔细分析，我们将解决以下问题：*特殊语言障碍的语言缺陷的本质是什么？*在特殊语言障碍中，语言的某些组成部分（如句法、音系、词汇）相对于其他部分有多大程度的保留？*表现因素在多大程度上影响了特殊语言障碍儿童的缺陷？当表现负荷增加时，特殊语言障碍儿童和正常儿童在语言任务上的表现下降到什么程度？*特殊语言障碍儿童和正常儿童是否在所有语言任务中都有一个（有限的）表现资源池，还是语言的每个子组件都有自己的专用资源？在某一语言领域的表现负荷增加会导致该领域的表现下降，还是会导致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?