Leech Robert, Aydelott Jennifer, Symons Germaine, Carnevale Julia, Dick Frederic
School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, UK.
Dev Sci. 2007 Nov;10(6):794-813. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00628.x.
How does the development and consolidation of perceptual, attentional, and higher cognitive abilities interact with language acquisition and processing? We explored children's (ages 5-17) and adults' (ages 18-51) comprehension of morphosyntactically varied sentences under several competing speech conditions that varied in the degree of attentional demands, auditory masking, and semantic interference. We also evaluated the relationship between subjects' syntactic comprehension and their word reading efficiency and general 'speed of processing'. We found that the interactions between perceptual and attentional processes and complex sentence interpretation changed considerably over the course of development. Perceptual masking of the speech signal had an early and lasting impact on comprehension, particularly for more complex sentence structures. In contrast, increased attentional demand in the absence of energetic auditory masking primarily affected younger children's comprehension of difficult sentence types. Finally, the predictability of syntactic comprehension abilities by external measures of development and expertise is contingent upon the perceptual, attentional, and semantic milieu in which language processing takes place.
感知、注意力和更高层次认知能力的发展与巩固如何与语言习得和处理相互作用？我们探究了儿童（5至17岁）和成人（18至51岁）在几种相互竞争的言语条件下对形态句法多样的句子的理解，这些条件在注意力需求程度、听觉掩蔽和语义干扰方面各不相同。我们还评估了受试者的句法理解与其单词阅读效率和一般“处理速度”之间的关系。我们发现，在发展过程中，感知和注意力过程与复杂句子解释之间的相互作用发生了很大变化。言语信号的感知掩蔽对理解有早期且持久的影响，尤其是对于更复杂的句子结构。相比之下，在没有强烈听觉掩蔽的情况下注意力需求增加主要影响年幼儿童对难句类型的理解。最后，通过发展和专业知识的外部测量来预测句法理解能力取决于语言处理发生时的感知、注意力和语义环境。
