Word processing at 19 months and its relation to language performance at 30 months: A retrospective analysis of data from German learning children

Abstract

Recent research has shown that the early lexical representations children establish in their second year of life already seem to be phonologically detailed enough to allow differentiation from very similar forms. In contrast to these findings children with specific language impairment show problems in discriminating phonologically similar word forms up to school age. In our study we investigated the question whether there would be differences in the processing of phonological details in normally developing and in children with low language performance in the second year of life. This was done by a retrospective study in which in the processing of phonological details was tested by a preferential looking experiment when the children were 19 months old. At the age of 30 months children were tested with a standardized German test of language comprehension and production (SETK2). The preferential looking data at 19 months revealed an opposite reaction pattern for the two groups: while the children scoring normally in the SETK2 increase their fixations of a pictured object only when it was named with the correct word, children with later low language performance did so only when presented with a phonologically slightly deviant mispronunciation. We suggest that this pattern does not point to a specific deficit in processing phonological information in these children but might be related to an instability of early phonological representations, and/or a generalized problem of information processing as compared to typically developing children.

Keywords:

• Word processing
• late talker
• early indicators for SLI
• processing of phonological details

Notes

1 The finding that we did not see any effect in the case of pronominal reference to the target picture is most likely related to the fact, that the children were not able to establish a connection between the pronoun and the nominal antecedent in the preceding sentence. In German, this relation is based on gender and number agreement between the pronominal anaphor and its nominal antecedent. Problems in computing this anaphoric relation may be due to the fact that the child has not yet acquired the gender and number features for the lexical entries of the noun and the pronoun, or to a memory problem, which would render the antecedent of the pronoun unavailable. The most likely explanation is, that the lexical entries for the noun and the pronoun are still missing the gender and number features, as evidenced by the fact that the obligatory use of determiners, which in German agree with nouns for gender and number, does not occur before 20 – 24 months of age. The intersentential anaphorical use of personal pronouns is observed even much later.

2 One of the reviewers pointed out that this analysis is only valid if there was no difference in looking times before the presentation of the acoustic stimulus which in fact was true for both experimental groups (p > .10 in each case).

3 We would like to thank one of our anonymous reviewers for having pointed this out to us.

4 It is a well-known phenomenon that “no” answers are harder to give than “yes” answers.