On-line processing and comprehension of direct object pronoun sentences in Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment

ABSTRACT

Eleven native Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (8;3–10;11) and 11 typically developing children (8;7–10;8) received a comprehensive psycholinguistic evaluation. Participants listened to either Direct Object (DO) pronoun sentences or filler sentences without any pronoun, and they decided whether a picture on the screen (depicting the antecedent, another noun in the sentence, or an unrelated object) was ‘alive’. They answered comprehension questions about pronoun sentences. Children with SLI showed significantly poorer comprehension of DO pronoun sentences when answering comprehension questions than children with Typical Language Development (TLD). This poor pronoun sentence understanding correlated significantly with poor auditory sentence completion, non-word repetition task and expressive vocabulary skills. Children with SLI were significantly slower in the animacy decisions than children with TLD across all pronoun and filler sentence conditions. Both groups exhibited high accuracy in the animacy decisions for any conditions. Clinical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Anaphora
• long-distance animate direct object pronouns
• on-line cross-modal task
• morphosyntactic processing
• morphosyntax knowledge
• phonological working memory
• pronoun sentence comprehension
• slow processing
• specific language impairment

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Richard G. Schwartz for his generous advice in designing the project and programming the E-Prime experiment.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This research was partly funded by the following grants from Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia in Spain: SAB2002-0037 and SAB2003-0310 to Richard G. Schwartz; PR2003-0061, PR2004-0336, and PR2004-0356 to Dolors Girbau. It was also partly supported by a grant from Universitat Jaume I/Bancaixa, P1·1B2007-33, D. Girbau, P.I.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by the following grants from Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia in Spain: SAB2002-0037 and SAB2003-0310 to Richard G. Schwartz; PR2003-0061, PR2004-0336, and PR2004-0356 to Dolors Girbau. It was also partly supported by a grant from Universitat Jaume I/Bancaixa, P1·1B2007-33, D. Girbau, P.I.