Sensitivity to Morphological Cues in Children with Specific Language Impairment

描述(申请人提供)：许多患有特殊语言障碍(SLI)的儿童在语法能力方面表现出严重的局限性。这种语法缺陷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，-S在Running中，IS在女孩在哭中)。这种不一致是区分SLI儿童与他们通常发育的同龄人的可靠手段。尽管这种不一致使用的细节已经在科学文献中得到了很好的描述，但其因素 对这一标志性症状负有责任的人还远远不清楚。这种认识的缺乏阻碍了成功的干预方法的发展，以改善这一问题。在本申请中，我们提出时态和一致的不一致源于这些儿童未能理解输入中出现的各种句子中的结构依赖，因此，这种不一致不需要假设出现了错误的单独的学习机制。问题句的共同特征是，无限位主谓序列在句子中出现的时间较晚，这是允许的，因为限定是以句子中较早出现的动词形式表示的。例如，我们看到女孩/她在跑步，女孩/她在哭吗？女孩/她吃完早餐了吗？由于儿童没有掌握这些结构依存关系，他们经常提取非限定主谓序列(如女孩跑、女孩哭)，并将这些不恰当的形式作为生成相同结构的新话语的基础。尽管新出现的证据表明，这些儿童实际上确实从较大的结构中提取了非限定主谓序列，但我们需要一种程序来测试这些儿童是否对句子中较早出现的限定形式与较晚出现的非限定主谓序列之间的关系敏感。通过应用边看边听的模式，我们现在可以开始测试这一提议。在四个实验中，我们将研究患有SLI的学龄前儿童及其典型发育同龄人在观看视频屏幕上的图片时听到问题时眼睛凝视的变化。我们预计，典型的发育中儿童会根据早期出现的有限信息(例如，当听到助词是在可爱的小猫吃东西吗？时，转移到复数所指的图片)来定向到目标图片。相比之下，我们预计SLI儿童将无法利用这一信息，而是在听到复数名词(例如，猫)后才朝向目标图片。此外，我们预计，儿童对这种早期出现的有限信息的敏感或不敏感将 在他们自己的言语中使用时态和同意限定形式时，可以显著预测他们的一致性/不一致性。支持这一建议的发现将对流行的理论产生重大影响，并提出一种完全不同的方法来治疗SLI儿童的这一顽固的语法问题。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) show serious limitations in grammatical ability. An especially common manifestation of this grammatical weakness is the inconsistent use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement (e.g., -s in runs and is in The girl is crying). This inconsistency serves as a reliable means of distinguishing children with SLI from their typically developing peers. Although the details of this inconsistent use have been well described in the scientific literature, the factors responsible for this hallmark symptom are far from clear. This lack of understanding has prevented the development of successful intervention methods for ameliorating this problem. In this application, we propose that tense and agreement inconsistency stems from these children's failure to understand the structural dependencies that hold within a wide variety of sentences that appear in the input, and, as a result, this inconsistency does not require an assumption of a separate learning mechanism that has gone awry. The common feature of the problematic sentences is that a nonfinite subject-verb sequence appears late in the sentence, and is allowed because finiteness is expressed in a verb form that appears earlier in the sentence. Examples include We saw the girl/her running, Is the girl/she crying?, and Did the girl/she finish her breakfast? As a result of the children's failure to grasp these structural dependencies, they often extract nonfinite subject-verb sequences (e.g., The girl/her running, The girl/she crying) and use these inappropriate forms as the basis for generating new utterances with the same structure. Although emerging evidence suggests that these children do, in fact, extract nonfinite subject-verb sequences from larger structures, we have needed a procedure that allows us to test whether these children are sensitive to the relationship between early-appearing finite forms in the sentence and later-appearing nonfinite subject-verb sequences. Through application of the looking-while-listening paradigm, we can now begin to test this proposal. In four experiments, we will examine the shifts in eye gaze of preschool-age children with SLI and their typically developing peers as they hear questions while looking at pairs of pictures on a video screen. We expect that typically developing children will orient toward the target picture on the basis of early-appearing finite information (e.g., shifting towarda picture of a plural referent upon hearing the auxiliary are in Are the nice little cats eating?). I contrast, we expect that children with SLI will fail to make use of this information and instead orient toward the target picture only after the plural noun (e.g., cats) is heard. Furthermore, we expect that children's sensitivity or insensitivity to this early-appearing finite information will serve as a significant predictor of their consistency/inconsistency in using tense and agreement finite forms in their own speech. Findings that support this proposal would have significant implications for prevailing theory and suggest a wholly different approach to treating this persistent grammatical problem in children with SLI.