Syntactic structural assignment in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with specific language impairment.
OBJECTIVE
In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses.


METHODS
Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4-10;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (± 3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task.


RESULTS
Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition.


CONCLUSIONS
The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension.
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, NY, USA. tfortunato@gc.cuny.edu
Talita
T
Fortunato-Tavares
Claudia R F
CR
de Andrade
Debora M
DM
Befi-Lopes
Arild
A
Hestvik
Baila
B
Epstein
Lidiya
L
Tornyova
Richard G
RG
Schwartz
D001938:Brazil; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007361:Intelligence Tests; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary