Effects of Immediate and Cumulative Syntactic Experience in Language Impairment: Evidence from Priming of Subject Relatives in Children with SLI

Abstract

We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a picture matching task. In a sentence repetition task, children repeated SRc. In the priming paradigm, children with SLI produced SRc after hearing the experimenter use SRc with the same or different lexical content; the magnitude of this priming effect was the same as in TDC. However, children with SLI showed a smaller cumulative priming effect than TDC. Children with SLI showed superior SRc performance in picture-matching than in sentence repetition. We propose that children with SLI have an abstract representation of SRc that can be facilitated by prior exposure, but exhibit impaired implicit learning mechanisms.

Notes

¹ Note that neither PPTV-4 nor MLU scores were significant predictors in the model, neither interacted with priming.

² An additional analysis of each group individually showed exactly the same pattern: 1% increase with each exposure in the SLI group compared to a 2% increase in the TD group. Note also that for all of our analyses, there was no change in the pattern of results when the 7 SRc responses involving thematic role reversal (all produced by children with SLI; 6.1% of their responses) were excluded.

³ It is possible that we would have found even stronger priming effects if the children had repeated (i.e., produced) the primes as well as comprehending them (though note that Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007, found no difference in priming in adults following produced versus comprehended primes). Even with comprehended primes, however, the priming effect was very strong (21% and 35% more SRc following SRc primes than following baseline primes in children with SLI and TD children respectively). Critically, the fact that there was no difference between groups in the magnitude of the immediate priming effect suggests that the children with SLI did not experience specific difficulties in comprehending the prime that impacted upon their tendency to repeat structure in their following description. Thus they showed the same benefit from comprehending a prime as the TD children.