Narrative comprehension and production in children with SLI: An eye movement study

Abstract

This study investigates narrative comprehension and production in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI (mean age 5;8 years) and 12 typically developing children (mean age 5;6 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment designed to investigate online narrative comprehension and production in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with SLI. The comprehension task involved the recording of eye movements during the visual exploration of successive scenes in a story, while listening to the associated narrative. With regard to production, the children were asked to retell the story, while once again looking at the scenes, as their eye movements were monitored. During narrative production, children with SLI look at the most semantically relevant areas of the scenes fewer times than their age-matched controls, but no differences were found in narrative comprehension. Moreover, the analyses of speech productions revealed that children with SLI retained less information and made more semantic and syntactic errors during retelling. Implications for theories that characterize SLI are discussed.

• specific language impairment
• eye movements
• comprehension
• production
• narrative

Notes

1. This study was carried out in Catalonia when it is very difficult to separate monolingual and bilingual children. It is important to be aware that in Catalonia both Spanish and Catalan are official languages, thus the proficiency of both Spanish and Catalan is if not native, native-like. In view of this situation, we analysed all the children's productions as if they came from one sole language. This would not interfere with the results, because all groups met the same conditions and all the structures analysed were similar in both languages. For a review of Catalan and Spanish bilingualism and SLI, see the recent study by Sanz-Torrent, Badia, and Serra (2008).