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

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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.