Input Sources of Grammatical Deficits in Specific Language Impairment

特定语言障碍中语法缺陷的输入源

• 批准号: 8225341
• 负责人: Marc E. Fey
• 金额: $ 47.65万
• 依托单位: PURDUE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-04-06 至 2014-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8225341
• 关键词: Academic achievement; Accounting; Address; Affect; Agreement; Area; Child; Clinical; Complex; Comprehension; Disease; Eating; Failure; Felis catus; Generations; Goals; Health; Hearing; Impairment; Individual Differences; Intervention Studies; Language; Lead; Literature; Methods; Morphology; Nature; Nursery Schools; Pattern; Performance; Persons; Population; Production; Protocols documentation; Randomized; Relative (related person); Reliance; Research Design; Role; Running; Short-Term Memory; Social Adjustment; Source; Speech; Symptoms; Testing; Twin Studies; Walking; abstracting; base; boys; design; experience; girls; novel; research study; specific language impairment; syntax

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show serious limitations in grammatical ability. These limitations are often longstanding, and they represent one of the most reliable indicators of this disorder. An especially common manifestation of this grammatical weakness is the inconsistent use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement (e.g., -s in jumps and is in The girl is eating). Although the details of this inconsistent use have been well described in the scientific literature, an explanation for the protracted period of inconsistency has not yet emerged. The goal of this project is to test a new proposal regarding the possible source of the inconsistent use of tense and agreement morphemes by children with SLI. Experiments 1-5 are designed to test the hypothesis that children with SLI have difficulty interpreting sentences that contain subject-verb sequences lacking tense and agreement morphology (as in the girl go in the question Did the girl go? or the boy running in the sentence I see the boy running). As a result, they treat these sequences (e.g., The girl go) as grammatical and use them in their own speech. [Furthermore, because the sentence interpretation problems are still present when the children begin to form abstract rules for sentence use, generalizations from these improperly extracted sequences become the source for generating new utterances, thus prolonging the period of inconsistent use of tense and agreement markers.] The first five experiments are designed: (a) to identify the specific types of sequences that might be problematic (e.g., questions and/or complex sentences); and (b) to determine whether the children generalize misinterpreted sequences to form new (ungrammatical) utterances of the same type (e.g., does misinterpretation of the girl go in Did the girl go? lead to spontaneous generation of productions such as The cat go?). [In addition, these experiments include complex sentence comprehension and working memory tasks as predictors to determine the relative contributions that syntactic comprehension difficulty and working memory limitations make to the children's tendency to omit tense and agreement morphology.] Experiment 6 is an intervention study designed to determine whether the period of inconsistency with tense and agreement morphology can be significantly reduced by manipulating the language input the children receive. Specifically, it is predicted that inconsistency can be reduced by exposing the children to many sentences containing the target morphemes (e.g., The girl jumps, The boy is walking) and minimizing exposures of questions (e.g., Did the girl go?) and complex sentences (e.g., I see the boy running) that contain subject-verb sequences with no tense and agreement morphology. [Along with its clinical value, this experiment serves as a critical test of the causal role of input distribution on the children's sentence use.] The findings of this project should contribute to a greater understanding of the sources of grammatical limitations in children with SLI and provide important information concerning how best to treat the pervasive tense and agreement weaknesses seen in this disorder. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Children with specific language impairment have a longstanding deficit in language ability that affects their social adjustment and academic achievement. The goal of this project is to discover the source of one of the most pervasive language difficulties of these children, a protracted period of grammatical inconsistency. The findings should lead to a greater understanding of this disorder and provide important information concerning methods of treatment.

描述（由申请人提供）：许多患有特定语言障碍（SLI）的儿童在语法能力上表现出严重的局限性。这些限制通常是长期存在的，它们是这种疾病最可靠的指标之一。这种语法弱点的一个特别常见的表现是，标记时态和一致的语法语素的使用不一致（例如，jumps 中的 -s 和 The Girl is eating 中的 is）。尽管科学文献中已经详细描述了这种不一致使用的细节，但对长期不一致的解释尚未出现。该项目的目标是测试一项关于 SLI 儿童使用时态和一致语素不一致的可能根源的新提案。实验 1-5 旨在检验以下假设：患有 SLI 的儿童难以解释包含缺乏时态和一致形态的主谓序列的句子（如问题“女孩走了吗？”中的“女孩走”或“我看到男孩跑”句子中的“男孩跑”）。因此，他们将这些序列（例如“女孩走”）视为符合语法的序列，并在自己的演讲中使用它们。 [此外，由于当孩子们开始形成句子使用的抽象规则时，句子解释问题仍然存在，这些不正确提取的序列的概括成为生成新话语的来源，从而延长了时态和一致标记不一致使用的时间。] 前五个实验设计为：（a）识别可能有问题的序列的特定类型（例如，问题和/或复杂句子）； (b) 确定孩子们是否将误解的序列概括为相同类型的新的（不合语法的）话语（例如，对女孩的误解是否会导致自发产生诸如猫走了？）。 [此外，这些实验包括复杂句子理解和工作记忆任务作为预测因子，以确定句法理解困难和工作记忆限制对儿童省略时态和一致词法倾向的相对贡献。]实验6是一项干预研究，旨在确定是否可以通过操纵儿童接收的语言输入来显着减少时态和一致词法不一致的时间。具体来说，据预测，通过让孩子们接触许多包含目标语素的句子（例如，女孩跳，男孩在走），并尽量减少问题（例如，女孩去了吗？）和复杂句子（例如，我看到男孩跑），这些句子包含没有时态和一致形态的主谓序列，可以减少不一致性。 [连同其临床价值，该实验可作为输入分布对儿童句子使用的因果作用的关键测试。]该项目的研究结果应有助于更好地了解 SLI 儿童语法限制的根源，并提供有关如何最好地治疗这种疾病中普遍存在的时态和一致性缺陷的重要信息。公共卫生相关性：有特定语言障碍的儿童长期存在语言能力缺陷，影响他们的社会适应和学业成绩。该项目的目标是发现这些儿童最普遍的语言困难之一的根源，即长期的语法不一致。这些发现应该有助于更好地了解这种疾病，并提供有关治疗方法的重要信息。