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

破译语音信号的语音、词汇和语法结构的能力是语言理解的重要前提，因此也是成功的教育和心理社会发展的重要前提。对于大多数儿童来说，语言解码能力背后的认知加工系统很容易在第一语言习得过程中发展起来。然而，一组被称为特殊语言障碍(SLI)的儿童并没有表现出与年龄相适应的语言解码和语言理解技能的习得。本研究项目的目的是使用眼球跟踪技术调查4至10岁说单语德语的儿童的在线语言解码和语言理解策略。60名SLI儿童(试验组)和同等数量的年龄匹配的语言习得儿童(控制组)参加了两个所谓的视觉世界范式(VWP)的实验。基本上，受试组将被要求将一个经过审计的语言刺激(一个短语或一个句子)与两幅图画相匹配。其中一幅画描绘了语言刺激(目标图片)的含义，而另一幅画则起到了语言干扰的作用。记录了语言-图片匹配过程中的眼动，这些眼动通常被认为反映了语言的加工过程，特别是在语言理解过程中语法性别的接受性加工。在许多心理语言学调查中，这一语法范畴的习得已被证明是SLI儿童的一个脆弱领域。然而，到目前为止，研究几乎完全是关于生产，而不是关于对性别信息的理解。在本文提出的两个实验中必须理解的刺激的结构是这样一种方式，即对性别信息的有效处理可以加速对目标图像的识别。在两项对没有SLI的小学生的先导性研究中，我们已经观察到性别加工在语言图片匹配中的这种有益效果。在该项目中，我们的目标是验证和区分这些观察结果，并调查SLI儿童对性别信息的反应是否不那么敏感或更慢。

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.