The contribution of visual and linguistic cues to the production of passives in ADHD and DLD: evidence from thematic priming

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how thematic priming via visual and linguistic cues influences the choice of syntactic voice in healthy French-speaking adults and in French-speaking children with typical and atypical development. In particular, we focused on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental language disorder (DLD), two clinical groups with documented syntactic difficulties. Twenty adults (M= 24;7) and 60 children aged 6–11 (20 typically developing, 20 with DLD and 20 with ADHD) were presented with agent or patient cues that progressively increased in strength over three conditions: a no cue condition, a visual cue condition with two cue types (perceptual vs. referential) and a linguistic cue condition with two cue types (topicalization of the agent/patient with and without subsequent sentence initiation). Results showed that all participants produced more passives after having been presented with a patient cue, regardless of cue type (cue > no cue), but linguistic cues facilitated the production of passives significantly more than visual cues (linguistic cue > visual cue). We also found that children with DLD were more sensitive than children with ADHD to visual cues (DLD > ADHD), which were more implicit than the linguistic cues and may have required more attentional resources. The opposite pattern (ADHD > DLD) was true for the linguistic cues, which required syntactic processing. These findings highlight how the development of dynamic tools using cue modality and cue sensitivity might be useful for discriminating children with and without syntactic impairment.

KEYWORDS:

• DLD
• ADHD
• passives
• thematic priming
• attention

Disclosure statement

The authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest (such as honoraria; educational grants; participation in speakers’ bureaus; membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest; and expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements), or non-financial interest (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs) in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Notes

¹ Previously referred to as specific language impairment.

² This is a licensed and frequent structure in French, in particular in colloquial speech (Prévost, 2009).

³ Although there are parallels between causative and be-passives, there are also some important differences. For example, stative verbs are rejected in causative passives, e.g., *John got loved/ John was loved (Hirsch & Wexler, 2004). Additionally, causative passives require the logical object to be [+affected], e.g., *The answer got found/ The answer was found (Guasti, 2016). For our work, which focuses exclusively on eventive verbs and [+affected] logical objects, these distinctions are not pertinent.

⁴ Similarly to TD children, empirical evidence suggests that not all passives are equally difficult for children with DLD, as they demonstrate little trouble comprehending non-reversible passives or short passives (D. v. Bishop et al., 2000; Van der Lely, 1996).

⁵ A sentence stem is the beginning of a sentence that is provided to a speaker to help him/her get his/her sentence started (see Example 9).

⁶ It was pointed out by an anonymous reviewer that there was no prediction regarding how the two clinical groups would perform compared to one another. However, the authors purposefully chose not to make such a prediction as it was hypothesized that both groups would demonstrate some difficulties with the task, although perhaps for different reasons.

⁷ This hypothesis is based on the finding that children with ADHD benefit more from clear, direct instruction and respond best to specific goals (R. A. Barkley, 2000; Daley & Birchwood, 2010). In contrast with the linguistic cues in which discourse constraints clearly facilitate the selection of a particular referent as the subject of the participant’s productions, the task expectations of the visual cue conditions are less obvious and may therefore be less effective for children with ADHD. Additionally, children with ADHD tend not to perform well when working independently, whereas on-task behavior improves significantly when working one-to-one with a teacher or in a small group (Hart et al., 2011). In a sense, the visual cue conditions mirror an independent work scenario, whereas the linguistic cue conditions, in which the child engages directly with the experimenter, are more reflective of a one-to-one learning environment.

⁸ We make this prediction as the linguistic cues use questions containing a topicalized patient, which require the concurrent integration of both syntactic and discourse related knowledge (Avrutin, 2000).

⁹ An anonymous reviewer pointed out that while the BILO performance of the ADHD group was significantly better than that of the DLD group, it was also significantly worse than that of the TD group (see Table 2). This is an interesting observation as it could potentially provide evidence of syntactic weakness in children with ADHD, and indeed, individual BILO results for the ADHD group revealed scores of at least −1.25 for nine of the 20 participants with ADHD. However, recall that Stanford and Delage (2020) reported that children with ADHD are more likely to perform below TD norms when tested using standardized omnibus syntax tests, such as the BILO, while performing comparably to TD peers on probe syntax tests that target clinical markers of DLD (findings that corroborate work done by Redmond et al., 2011).

¹⁰ To test the production of the passive, we used the productions from the second linguistic condition of the priming study (see example 12 below).

¹¹ An anonymous reviewer asked if the participants were given specific instructions to justify the fact that they saw two pictures for referential cues and one picture for perceptual cues. During the practice session at the beginning of the visual cue condition, it was clearly explained to the participants that sometimes they would see pictures in which one of the two characters was in colour while the other was in black and white, and sometimes they would see a picture of one of the two characters alone before seeing the picture of the event. It was made clear to all participants (and understanding was checked during the practice phase) that they should only provide descriptions of images in which two characters appeared together.

¹² We would like to thank Kristine Jensen de López for granting us permission to use and adapt these pictures, which were created in the context of the NASUD project she led, which was funded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation (grant 273–07-0495).

¹³ While the majority (93%) of the participants’ passive productions contained a by-phrase, we accepted both long and short passives as target responses.

¹⁴ It is important to highlight that we used “low production rates” here to mean low compared to the other two child groups and adults. It is clear that children with DLD produced a significantly greater number of passives when linguistic rather than visual cues were used. However, if we normalize performance to that of TD children and healthy adults, we see that the proportion of passives produced by children with DLD in the visual conditions is relatively high, whereas it is rather low in the linguistic conditions.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.