title: Interpretation of Anaphoric Dependencies in Russian-speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder.
abstract: We examined anaphora resolution in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to clarify whether 1) DLD is best understood as missing knowledge of certain linguistic operations/elements or as unreliable performance and 2) if comprehension of sentences with anaphoric expressions as objects and exceptionally case marked (ECM) subjects supports a particular theoretical account of anaphora. Fifty-four native-Russian-speaking children (ageM= 7;6,SD= 1;9) were tested on a picture selection task. Children with DLD (n=18) underperformed overall, but displayed similar patterns to the typically developing (TD) group with respect to the extra difficulty of the ECM relative to the transitive and ECM pronouns relative to all other conditions. However, whereas pronouns were more difficult than reflexives for the TD children, this effect was not significant for the DLD group, whose reduced accuracy on reflexives washed out the effect of pronouns in that group. These results are consistent with performance-level vulnerability in DLD, arguably related to weaknesses in lexical processing and with the Reflexivity framework of Binding phenomena.
authors.affiliation: Wayne State University, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Detroit, United States.
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Rakhlin
authors.affiliation: Yale University, New Haven, United States. Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
authors.forename: Sergey A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Kornilov
authors.affiliation: Temple University, Philadelphia, United States.
authors.forename: Jodi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Reich
authors.affiliation: Yale University, Child Study Center, Department of Psychology, Department of Epidemiology & Public Health, New Haven, United States.
authors.forename: Elena L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Grigorenko