Online-Processing of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Language Comprehension: Differences between Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

口语理解中语法性别的在线处理：有特定语言障碍和没有特定语言障碍的儿童之间的差异

• 批准号: 394447853
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Thomas Günther
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Klinik für Psychiatrie, Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie des Kinder- und Jugendalters
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2017-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/394447853?language=en
• 关键词: Online; Processing; Grammatical; Gender; Spoken

The ability to decode the phonological, lexical and grammatical structure of a speech signal is an important prerequisite for language comprehension and as a consequence for a successful educational and psychosocial development. For most children the cognitive processing systems underlying linguistic decoding abilities develop easily in the course of first language acquisition. However, a subgroup of children affected by a developmental condition called Specific Language Impairment (SLI) does not show an age appropriate acquisition of linguistic decoding and language comprehension skills.The purpose of the research project applied for here is to investigate online linguistic decoding and language comprehension strategies in four- to ten-year old monolingual German speaking children using eye-tracking technology. 60 children with SLI (experimentel group) and an equal number of age-matched children with age-appropriate language acquisition (control group) are supposed to participate in two experiments from the so-called Visual World Paradigm (VWP). Basically, the subject groups will be asked to match an auditorily presented language stimulus (a phrase or a sentence) with two drawings. One of the drawings depicts the meaning of the language stimulus (target picture) while the other serves as a linguistic distractor. Eye-movements during language-picture matching, which are generally assumed to reflect linguistic processing, are recorded.In particular, the receptive processing of grammatical gender during language comprehension will be examined. In many psycholinguistic investigations the acquisition of this grammatical category has been shown to constitute an area of vulnerability in children with SLI. However, so far research has almost exclusively been conducted on production and not on comprehension of gender information. The stimuli which have to be comprehended in the two experiments proposed here are structured in a way that efficient processing of gender information could speed up the identification of the target picture. In two pilot studies with primary school children without SLI we already observed this kind of beneficial effect of gender processing in language picture matching. Within the project we aim to validate and differentiate these observations and to investigate whether children with SLI respond less sensitive or more slowly to gender information.

解码语音信号的语音、词汇和语法结构的能力是语言理解的重要先决条件，也是成功的教育和心理社会发展的结果。对于大多数儿童来说，语言解码能力背后的认知加工系统在第一语言习得过程中很容易发展。然而，一个亚组的儿童受发展条件称为特定语言障碍（SLI）并没有显示出相应年龄的收购语言解码和语言理解skills.The研究项目的目的申请在这里是调查在线语言解码和语言理解策略在4 - 10岁的单语德语使用眼动追踪技术。60名SLI儿童（实验组）和同等数量的年龄匹配的语言习得儿童（对照组）被要求参加两个实验，实验采用视觉世界范式（VWP）。基本上，受试者组将被要求将一个非正式呈现的语言刺激（一个短语或一个句子）与两幅图画相匹配。其中一幅图画描绘了语言刺激的意义（目标图画），而另一幅图画则充当语言干扰物。本研究记录了语言-图片匹配过程中的眼动，这些眼动通常被认为反映了语言加工过程，特别是语言理解过程中语法性别的接受加工过程。在许多心理语言学研究中，这一语法范畴的习得被证明是SLI儿童的一个脆弱领域。然而，迄今为止，研究几乎完全是关于生产，而不是关于对性别信息的理解。在这里提出的两个实验中必须理解的刺激是以有效处理性别信息的方式构造的，可以加速目标图片的识别。在两项针对没有SLI的小学生的试点研究中，我们已经观察到性别处理在语言图片匹配中的这种有益影响。在这个项目中，我们的目标是验证和区分这些观察结果，并调查SLI儿童对性别信息的反应是否不太敏感或更慢。