Rakhlin Natalia, Kornilov Sergey A, Kornilova Tatiana V, Grigorenko Elena L
Wayne State University, Detroit, United States & Yale University, New Haven, United States.
Yale University, New Haven, United States & Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
Lang Acquis. 2016;23(4):333-360. doi: 10.1080/10489223.2016.1179312. Epub 2016 May 16.
We investigated relative clause (RC) comprehension in 44 Russian-speaking children with typical language (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD); age = 10.67, = 2.84, and 22 adults. Flexible word order and morphological case in Russian allowed us to isolate factors that are obscured in English, helping us to identify sources of syntactic complexity and evaluate their roles in RC comprehension by children with typical language and their peers with DLD. We administered a working memory and an RC comprehension (picture-choice) task, which contained subject- and object-gap center-embedded and right branching RCs. The TD group, but not adults, demonstrated the effects of gap, embedding, and case. Their lower accuracy relative to adults was not fully attributable to differences in working memory. The DLD group displayed lower than TD children overall accuracy, accounted for by their lower working memory scores. While the effect of gap and embedding on their performance was not different from what was found for the TD group, children with DLD exhibited a diminished effect of case, suggesting reduced sensitivity to morphological case markers as processing cues. The implications of these results to theories of syntactic complexity and core deficits in DLD are discussed.
我们对44名俄语儿童（其中22名发育正常，22名患有发育性语言障碍）以及22名成年人的关系从句（RC）理解能力进行了研究。这些儿童年龄为10.67岁，标准差为2.84。俄语中灵活的词序和形态格使我们能够分离出在英语中被掩盖的因素，有助于我们识别句法复杂性的来源，并评估其在发育正常儿童及其患有发育性语言障碍的同龄人对关系从句理解中的作用。我们进行了一项工作记忆和关系从句理解（图片选择）任务，其中包含主语-空位和宾语-空位的中心嵌入关系从句以及右分支关系从句。发育正常的儿童组（但成年人没有）表现出空位、嵌入和格的影响。他们相对于成年人较低的准确率并不完全归因于工作记忆的差异。发育性语言障碍组的总体准确率低于发育正常的儿童组，这是由他们较低的工作记忆分数所导致的。虽然空位和嵌入对他们表现的影响与发育正常儿童组的情况没有差异，但患有发育性语言障碍的儿童表现出格的影响减弱，这表明他们对形态格标记作为处理线索的敏感性降低。我们讨论了这些结果对句法复杂性理论以及发育性语言障碍核心缺陷的启示。
