The Graduate Center, City University of New York, NY, USA.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2012 Aug;55(4):1097-111. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2011/10-0215). Epub 2012 Jan 9.
In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses.
Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4-10;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (± 3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task.
Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition.
The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension.
在这项研究中，作者通过检查与非相邻名词相关的谓语和反身代词的句子理解，测试了层级关系缺陷（HOD）假说。该假说和更现代的版本假设，特定语言障碍（SLI）儿童在建立句子中元素的非相邻（层次）关系方面存在困难。作者还测试了在包含反身代词的结构中增加额外的工作记忆需求是否会影响 SLI 儿童在句子结构方面的错误程度，这表现为他们在图片指向理解反应中的错误。
16 名巴西葡萄牙语母语的 SLI 儿童（8 岁 4-10 岁 6 个月）和 16 名具有典型语言发展（TLD）的儿童，按年龄（±3 个月）、性别和社会经济地位相匹配，参加了 2 项实验（谓语和反身代词解释）。在反身代词实验中，作者还操纵了工作记忆需求。每个实验都涉及 4 种选择图片的句子理解任务。
SLI 儿童在所有条件下的准确性都显著较低。与短工作记忆条件相比，两个组在长工作记忆条件下，做出更多的层级句法结构错误。
HOD 假说未被证实。对于两个组来说，句法因素（结构赋值）比词汇因素（介词）更容易受到句子误解中工作记忆效应的影响。
