Richards Susan, Goswami Usha
Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK.
Brain Sci. 2019 Feb 5;9(2):33. doi: 10.3390/brainsci9020033.
In oral language, syntactic structure is cued in part by phrasal metrical hierarchies of acoustic stress patterns. For example, many children's texts use prosodic phrasing comprising tightly integrated hierarchies of metre and syntax to highlight the phonological and syntactic structure of language. Children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) are relatively insensitive to acoustic stress. Here, we disrupted the coincidence of metrical and syntactic boundaries as cued by stress patterns in children's texts so that metrical and/or syntactic phrasing conflicted. We tested three groups of children: children with DLD, age-matched typically developing controls (AMC) and younger language-matched controls (YLC). Children with DLDs and younger, language-matched controls were poor at spotting both metrical and syntactic disruptions. The data are interpreted within a prosodic phrasing hypothesis of DLD based on impaired acoustic processing of speech rhythm.
在口语中，句法结构部分由重音模式的短语韵律层次来提示。例如，许多儿童文本使用由紧密整合的韵律和句法层次组成的韵律短语来突出语言的音系和句法结构。患有发育性语言障碍（DLD）的儿童对重音相对不敏感。在这里，我们打乱了儿童文本中由重音模式提示的韵律和句法边界的一致性，从而使韵律和/或句法短语产生冲突。我们测试了三组儿童：患有DLD的儿童、年龄匹配的典型发育对照组（AMC）和年龄较小的语言匹配对照组（YLC）。患有DLD的儿童和年龄较小的语言匹配对照组在发现韵律和句法干扰方面都很差。这些数据是在基于语音节奏的声学处理受损的DLD韵律短语假说中进行解释的。
