Department of Development Psychology and Socialization, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2009 Nov-Dec;44(6):941-61. doi: 10.1080/13682820802491794.
Non-word repetition in children is a skill related to, but separable from grammatical ability. Lexical skill may bridge the gap between these two abilities.
The main aim was to determine whether real-word-repetition tasks could be better as predictors of grammatical ability than non-word-repetition tasks in children with typical language. This proposal was pursued because lexical knowledge was assumed to make performance in repetition tasks more representative of other language abilities, whereas non-word-repetition tasks are heavily influenced by phonological short-term memory.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: In order to investigate this possibility, three repetition tasks (two real-word lists characterized by different lexical knowledge and one non-word list), were compared in three groups of three- to four-year-olds with typical language (42 children). Grammatical ability was tested through probes for third-person plural inflection and direct-object critic use.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Real words were repeated more accurately than non-words and the non-words were more sensitive to Syllable length than real words. Performance on all repetition tasks was correlated with grammatical ability, but real words predicted variance in grammatical ability to a greater extent than non-words.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Given the lexical information contained in real words, repetition of such words was a better predictor of grammatical ability than non-word repetition. Future research should replicate and extend these results. Tasks using real words may also have considerable clinical potential; for this reason, these tasks might also be included in studies of children with language impairment.
儿童的非单词重复是一种与语法能力相关但可分离的技能。词汇技能可能可以弥合这两种能力之间的差距。
主要目的是确定在具有典型语言的儿童中，真实单词重复任务是否可以比非单词重复任务更好地预测语法能力。提出这个建议是因为假设词汇知识会使重复任务中的表现更能代表其他语言能力，而非单词重复任务则受到语音短期记忆的强烈影响。
为了研究这种可能性，我们在三组具有典型语言的 3 至 4 岁儿童（42 名儿童）中比较了三种重复任务（两个具有不同词汇知识的真实单词列表和一个非单词列表）。通过第三人称复数屈折和直接宾语批评使用的探针测试语法能力。
真实单词比非单词更准确地重复，而非单词比真实单词对音节长度更敏感。所有重复任务的表现都与语法能力相关，但真实单词比非单词更能预测语法能力的变化。
鉴于真实单词中包含的词汇信息，重复这些单词比非单词重复更能预测语法能力。未来的研究应该复制和扩展这些结果。使用真实单词的任务也可能具有相当大的临床潜力；出于这个原因，这些任务也可能被纳入语言障碍儿童的研究中。
