What is it about?
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show important difficulties in the use of verbs. The present study shows how children with DLD comprehend verbal number morphology in an online task (singular morphological markers vs. plural morphological markers), using an eye-tracking method.
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Why is it important?
The empirical results suggest that number morphology comprehension in children with DLD could be more typical than what is generally considered to be. A more preserved comprehension of verb morphology raises the possibility of a better prognosis. Additionally, teachers and speech therapists may enable the comprehension of growing complex grammar through the use of verb morphology in simple sentences, along with the support of visual scenes and the gradual addition of more complex structures.
Perspectives
We hope that our research will have an impact in the clinical and educational reality of children with DLD. It is important to keep in mind that a dysfunctional language is closely related to school failure. In this sense, the design of specific psycholinguistic material can be the basis in order to experience a more fluid linguistic, educational and emotional development.
Spyros Christou
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Online Comprehension of Verbal Number Morphology in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, November 2022, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), DOI: 10.1044/2022_jslhr-21-00591.
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Scripts and data
Insights from real-time comprehension of Spanish verbal tense in children with developmental language disorder: An eye-tracking study
The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish-and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (M age 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (M age 7.8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (M age 6.8 years), and 24 adults (M age 22.5 years). Empirical data revealed that children with DLD can comprehend verbal tense, at least in the present experimental conditions. Based on the empirical results and despite some minor differences between the DLD group and the chronological control group, we suggest that tense morphology comprehension in DLD might be more typical than what is generally considered. Additionally, we propose that verbal comprehension difficulties in children with DLD might be less related to the lack of understanding of specific morphological markers, and more to an accumulation of difficulty which leads to a linguistic processing slowdown.
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