Input Sources of Grammatical Deficits in Specific Language Impairment

描述（由申请人提供）：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。这种语法缺陷的一个特别常见的表现是表示时态和一致性的语法语素的不一致使用（例如，跳跃中的-s和the girl is eating中的is）。尽管科学文献对这种不一致使用的细节已经有了很好的描述，但对长期不一致的解释尚未出现。本项目的目的是测试一个关于特殊语言障碍儿童时态和一致语素使用不一致的可能来源的新建议。实验1-5的设计是为了验证一个假设，即患有特殊语言障碍的儿童在解释包含缺乏时态和一致形态的主-动词序列的句子时存在困难(如在问题Did the girl go？或者我看到男孩在跑这个句子中的男孩在跑)。因此，他们将这些序列（例如，The girl go）视为合乎语法的，并在自己的讲话中使用它们。[此外，由于当儿童开始形成抽象的句子使用规则时，仍然存在句子解释问题，从这些不正确提取的序列中得出的概括成为产生新话语的来源，从而延长了时态和一致标记使用不一致的时期。]前五个实验的设计：(a)确定可能有问题的特定类型的序列（例如，疑问句和/或复合句）；(b)确定儿童是否将被误解的序列归纳为形成相同类型的新（不符合语法的）话语(例如，对女孩的误解是否进入了Did the girl go？会自发产生诸如《猫走了？》之类的作品。[此外，这些实验以复杂句子理解和工作记忆任务作为预测因素，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形态倾向的相对贡献。]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受的语言输入来显著缩短时态和一致词法不一致的时间。具体来说，预测可以通过让孩子们接触许多包含目标语素的句子（例如，女孩跳了，男孩在走）和尽量减少问题（例如，女孩去了吗？）和复杂句子（例如，我看到男孩在跑）的暴露来减少不一致，这些句子包含主谓序列，没有时态和一致的形态。本实验除了具有临床价值外，还对输入分布对儿童句子使用的因果作用进行了关键性的检验。这个项目的发现应该有助于更好地理解特殊语言障碍儿童语法限制的来源，并提供关于如何最好地治疗这种障碍中普遍存在的时态和一致性弱点的重要信息。

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.