Hall Jessica, Owen Van Horne Amanda J, McGregor Karla K, Farmer Thomas A
The University of Iowa, Iowa City.
The University of Delaware, Newark.
Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch. 2018 Aug 14;49(3S):694-709. doi: 10.1044/2018_LSHSS-STLT1-17-0134.
This study examined whether children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership similarly to their typically developing (TD) peers and whether developmental differences existed within and between DLD and TD groups.
Sixteen children ages 7-9 with DLD, 26 age-matched TD children, 17 college students with DLD, and 17 TD college students participated in this task. We used an artificial grammar learning paradigm in which participants had to use knowledge of category membership to determine the acceptability of test items that they had not heard during a training phase.
Individuals with DLD performed similarly to TD peers in distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical combinations, with no differences between age groups. The order in which items were heard at test differentially affected child versus adult participants and showed a relation with attention and phonological working memory as well.
Differences in ratings between grammatical and ungrammatical items in this task suggest that individuals with DLD can form grammatical categories from novel input and more broadly use distributional information. Differences in order effects suggest a developmental timeline for sensitivity to updating distributional information.
本研究考察了患有发育性语言障碍（DLD）的儿童和成人是否能够像发育正常（TD）的同龄人一样，利用人工语言中的分布信息来学习语法类别成员关系，以及DLD组和TD组内部及之间是否存在发育差异。
16名7至9岁患有DLD的儿童、26名年龄匹配的发育正常儿童、17名患有DLD的大学生和17名发育正常的大学生参与了这项任务。我们采用了一种人工语法学习范式，参与者必须利用类别成员关系的知识来确定他们在训练阶段未听过的测试项目的可接受性。
患有DLD的个体在区分符合语法和不符合语法的组合方面与发育正常的同龄人表现相似，各年龄组之间没有差异。测试时听到项目的顺序对儿童和成人参与者有不同的影响，并且也与注意力和语音工作记忆有关。
本任务中符合语法和不符合语法项目评分的差异表明，患有DLD的个体可以从新的输入中形成语法类别，并更广泛地利用分布信息。顺序效应的差异表明了对更新分布信息的敏感性的发育时间表。
