Sensitivity to Morphological Cues in Children with Specific Language Impairment

描述（由申请人提供）：许多患有特定语言障碍（SLI）的儿童表现出严重的语法能力限制。这种语法弱点的一个特别常见的表现是标记时态和一致性的语法语素的不一致使用（例如，-s in runs and is in The girl is crying）.这种不一致性是区分SLI儿童与正常发育的同龄人的可靠手段。虽然这种不一致使用的细节在科学文献中已经有了很好的描述， 造成这一标志性症状的原因还远不清楚。这种缺乏了解阻碍了成功的干预方法的发展，以改善这一问题。在这个应用程序中，我们提出，紧张和协议的不一致源于这些孩子的未能理解的结构依赖关系，在各种各样的句子中出现的输入，因此，这种不一致性不需要一个假设的一个单独的学习机制，已经出了差错。问题句的共同特征是非限定性主谓序列出现在句子的后面，并且是允许的，因为限定性是以动词形式出现在句子的前面。例如：We saw the girl/her running，Is the girl/she crying？那个女孩/她吃完早餐了吗？由于儿童未能掌握这些结构依赖性，他们经常提取非限定的主语-动词序列（例如，The girl/she running，The girl/she crying），并使用这些不恰当的形式作为生成具有相同结构的新话语的基础。虽然新出现的证据表明，这些儿童确实从较大的结构中提取了非限定性主谓序列，但我们需要一个程序来测试这些儿童是否对句子中早期出现的限定形式和后来出现的非限定性主谓序列之间的关系敏感。通过应用边看边听的范例，我们现在可以开始测试这个提议。在四个实验中，我们将研究SLI的学龄前儿童和他们通常发展的同龄人的眼睛注视的变化，因为他们听到的问题，而在视频屏幕上看成对的图片。我们预计，发育正常的儿童会根据早期出现的有限信息（例如，当听到助动词在Are the nice little cats eating？（可爱的小猫在吃东西吗？）相比之下，我们预计SLI儿童将无法利用这些信息，而是只在复数名词之后指向目标图片（例如，猫）听到了。此外，我们预计，儿童对这种早期出现的有限信息的敏感性或不敏感性将 作为一个显着的预测，他们的一致性/不一致性，在使用紧张和协议有限的形式，在自己的讲话。支持这一建议的研究结果将对主流理论产生重大影响，并提出一种完全不同的方法来治疗SLI儿童的这种持续性语法问题。

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.