Subject Relative Production in SLI Children during Syntactic Priming and Sentence Repetition
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLIC) experi-ence difficulties in processing Subject relative clauses (SRC). This has been interpreted as evidence that they lack syntac-tic representations for SRC. Our study investigates the spon-taneous production of SRC in typically developing children (TDC) and SLIC in a structural priming paradigm, and com-pares their performance in a sentence repetition task. We demonstrate that SLIC are much more likely to produce SRC during priming than in sentence repetition; moreover, when primed, their performance matches TDC’s baseline (unprimed) performance. Furthermore, we design two simple unsuper-vised Bayesian models, and predict the developmental group (SLI, TD) and priming condition (Primed, Non-Primed). Over-all, this study shows that SLIC can spontaneously produce SRC when primed, suggesting their impairment is related to working memory, rather than a deficit in syntactic knowledge.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2124690128