Fortunato-Tavares Talita, Andrade Claudia R F, Befi-Lopes Debora, Limongi Suelly O, Fernandes Fernanda D M, Schwartz Richard G
Department of Physiotherapy, Speech-Language and Hearing Sciences and Occupational Therapy, School of Medicine, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo , Brazil , and.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2015 Jul;29(7):499-522. doi: 10.3109/02699206.2015.1027831. Epub 2015 Apr 22.
This study examined syntactic assignment for predicates and reflexives as well as working memory effects in the sentence comprehension of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), Down syndrome (DS), high functioning Autism (HFA) and Typical Language Development (TLD). Fifty-seven children (35 boys and 22 girls) performed a computerised picture-selection sentence comprehension task. Predicate attachment and reflexive antecedent assignment (with working memory manipulations) were investigated. The results showed that SLI, HFA and DS children exhibited poorer overall performance than TLD children. Children with SLI exhibited similar performance to the DS and HFA children only when working memory demands were higher. We conclude that children with SLI, HFA and DS differ from children with TLD in their comprehension of predicate and reflexive structures where the knowledge of syntactic assignment is required. Working memory manipulation had different effects on syntactic comprehension depending on language disorder. Intelligence was not an explanatory factor for the differences observed in performance.
本研究考察了特定语言障碍（SLI）、唐氏综合征（DS）、高功能自闭症（HFA）和语言发育正常（TLD）儿童在句子理解中对谓语和反身代词的句法赋值以及工作记忆效应。57名儿童（35名男孩和22名女孩）完成了一项电脑化的图片选择句子理解任务。研究了谓语附着和反身代词先行词赋值（伴有工作记忆操作）。结果表明，SLI、HFA和DS儿童的总体表现比TLD儿童差。只有当工作记忆需求较高时，SLI儿童的表现才与DS和HFA儿童相似。我们得出结论，在需要句法赋值知识的谓语和反身代词结构理解方面，SLI、HFA和DS儿童与TLD儿童存在差异。工作记忆操作对句法理解的影响因语言障碍而异。智力并非观察到的表现差异的解释因素。
