Simulating Specific Language Impairment: Effects of Sentence Length and Input Rate on Complex Sentence Comprehension
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Purpose: Relative to their age peers, children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significantly greater difficulty processing and comprehending verbal be passive and object relative sentences, but not subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences.Children with SLI also consistently evidence reduced phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and slower processing speed.This project examined the potential association between these SLI characteristics by attempting to simulate the complex sentence comprehension problems in a group of typically developing children by inducing difficulty comprehending sentences involving syntactic movement (van der Lely, 2005).Method: Thirty six 7-to 11-year-old children completed a real-time sentence comprehension task in which they selected the agent of the sentence.Sentence comprehension was made harder by introducing two stress factors, sentence length and input rate (designed to stress pSTM and speed of language processing), to passive, object relative, and SVO sentences.Children received equal numbers of 9-, 12-, and 15-word sentences of each sentence type blocked by normal rate, 20% faster rate, and 33% faster rate.The primary dependent variables were sentence comprehension accuracy and speed.The separate effects of sentence length and input rate were of central interest.
Author: Mianisha C. Finney
Institution: Ohio University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W87134078