Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 May;217:105350. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105350. Epub 2022 Feb 2.
Some animacy configurations elicit parallel semantic interference in adult production and comprehension; for example, phrases with similar animate nouns like the man that the girl is hugging are more difficult than phrases like the doll that the girl is hugging. Yet little is known about how this interference manifests in development, particularly, beyond early childhood. Because frontal brain maturation and cognitive control improvements are known to occur across late childhood and adolescence, we investigated (a) how animacy-induced difficulty in production and comprehension vary with age throughout this period and (b) whether control processes reflected in the backward digit span (BDS) test uniquely explained these differences besides other language measures. In separate tasks, participants (8- to 15-year-old children; N = 91) heard auditory descriptions of depicted characters, produced characters' descriptions, and completed BDS, vocabulary, and reading experience tests. Results indicated that, as in adults, animacy modulated performance in production and comprehension across all ages. The animacy modulation interacted with age in production but not in comprehension, suggesting age-related animacy differences in production but relatively stable differences in comprehension despite processing speed improvements. Importantly, these age-related production differences were also modulated by the BDS scores; only participants with higher BDS scores displayed age-related animacy differences. Together, these results indicate that comprehension and production develop at different rates and that the development of BDS performance interacts with age-dependent changes in sentence planning from late childhood to adolescence. More generally, the study highlights tasks' disparities to be explained by cognitive and developmental models of language.
有些有生命配置在成人的产生和理解中会引起平行的语义干扰；例如，与类似有生命的名词的短语，如女孩拥抱的男人，比女孩拥抱的娃娃的短语更难。然而，对于这种干扰在发展中是如何表现的，我们知之甚少，特别是在儿童早期之后。由于已知额叶大脑成熟和认知控制的改善发生在整个童年后期和青春期，我们研究了（a）在整个期间，产生和理解中的生动性引起的困难如何随年龄而变化，以及（b）在其他语言测量之外，反映在回溯数字跨度（BDS）测试中的控制过程是否可以唯一地解释这些差异。在单独的任务中，参与者（8 至 15 岁的儿童；N=91）听到了描述描绘人物的听觉描述，生成了人物的描述，并完成了 BDS、词汇和阅读经验测试。结果表明，与成年人一样，生动性在所有年龄段的产生和理解中都调节了性能。生动性调制与产生中的年龄相互作用，但在理解中没有相互作用，这表明尽管处理速度有所提高，但在产生中与年龄相关的生动性差异以及相对稳定的理解差异。重要的是，这些与年龄相关的产生差异也受到 BDS 分数的调节；只有具有较高 BDS 分数的参与者才表现出与年龄相关的生动性差异。总的来说，这些结果表明理解和产生以不同的速度发展，并且 BDS 性能的发展与从童年后期到青春期的句子规划中年龄相关的变化相互作用。更一般地说，该研究强调了任务之间的差异，这些差异需要用语言的认知和发展模型来解释。
