A developmental account of the role of sequential dependencies in typical and atypical language learners

ABSTRACT

The Gerken lab has shown that infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer readily accessible to adults. The Goffman lab has shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) exhibit deficits in learning sequential dependencies that influence the acquisition of words and grammar, as well as other types of domain general sequences. Thus, DLD appears to be an impaired ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains. We meld these two lines of research to propose a novel account in which sequential dependency learning is required for many phonological and morphosyntactic patterns in natural language and is also central to the language and domain general deficits that are attested in DLD. However, patterns that are not dependent on sequential dependencies but rather on networks of stored forms are learnable by children with DLD as well as by adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Language development
• infants
• developmental language disorder
• motor skill
• sequencing
• artificial grammar
• phonotactics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [Grant Number R01DC004826]; National Science Foundation [Grant Number BCS-1724842].