title: Decreased sensitivity to long-distance dependencies in children with a history of specific language impairment: electrophysiological evidence.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  One possible source of tense and agreement limitations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a weakness in appreciating structural dependencies that occur in many sentences in the input. This possibility was tested in the present study.
  
  
  METHODS
  Children with a history of SLI (H-SLI; n = 12; M = 9;7 [years;months]) and typically developing same-age peers (TD; n = 12; M = 9;7) listened to and made grammaticality judgments about grammatical and ungrammatical sentences involving either a local agreement error (e.g., "Every night they talks on the phone") or a long-distance finiteness error (e.g., "He makes the quiet boy talks a little louder"). Electrophysiological (ERP) and behavioral (accuracy) measures were obtained.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Local agreement errors elicited the expected anterior negativity and P600 components in both groups of children. However, relative to the TD group, the P600 effect for the long-distance finiteness errors was delayed, reduced in amplitude, and shorter in duration for the H-SLI group. The children's grammaticality judgments were consistent with the ERP findings.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Children with H-SLI seem to be relatively insensitive to the finiteness constraints that matrix verbs place on subject-verb clauses that appear later in the sentence.
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Purdy
authors.forename: Laurence B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Leonard
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weber-Fox
authors.forename: Natalya
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kaganovich
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary