Giberga Albert, Guerra Ernesto, Ahufinger Nadia, Igualada Alfonso, Aguilera Mari, Esteve-Gibert Núria
Estudis de Psicologia i Ciències de l'Educació, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.
Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
J Commun Disord. 2025 May-Jun;115:106525. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2025.106525. Epub 2025 Mar 19.
The combination of linguistic prosody and bodily signals help typically developing children (TD) in accessing pragmatic meanings. We investigated the benefits of prosodic and gestural cues for processing pragmatic meanings in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), having difficulties with structural language and pragmatics. 34 children with DLD and 45 TD controls, aged 5 to 10, participated in two visual-world eye-tracking tasks on pragmatic meanings that varied in complexity and develop in different stages: interrogative meaning (Exp. 1, less complex, developing earlier) and indirect requests (Exp. 2, more complex, developing later). In both experiments we manipulated the cues highlighting the intended meaning (prosodically-enhanced, multimodally-enhanced, and no-enhancement). The results showed that all children benefited from prosodic- and multimodal-enhancement to comprehend less complex meanings developing earlier, that younger children with DLD were less accurate even if such cues were present, and that the multimodal-enhancement was especially helpful for children with DLD when processing more complex meanings at an older age. Eye gaze data in both experiments revealed that, compared to TD children, children with DLD showed less clear preference to look at the Target image after the unfolding of bodily and prosodic cues, but that multimodal cues did reduce the children's bias to look at the literal interpretation of indirect requests. Our results highlight the importance of prosodic and bodily cues for the processing of pragmatic meanings that vary in complexity, especially when linguistic abilities are impaired, and have important implications on the communicative strategies that professionals use with children with DLD.
语言韵律和身体信号的结合有助于正常发育的儿童理解语用意义。我们调查了韵律和手势线索对患有发育性语言障碍（DLD）的儿童处理语用意义的益处，这些儿童在语言结构和语用方面存在困难。34名患有DLD的儿童和45名年龄在5至10岁的正常发育儿童对照组参与了两项关于语用意义的视觉世界眼动追踪任务，这些任务在复杂性上有所不同且在不同阶段发展：疑问意义（实验1，较简单，发展较早）和间接请求（实验2，较复杂，发展较晚）。在两个实验中，我们操纵了突出预期意义的线索（韵律增强、多模态增强和无增强）。结果表明，所有儿童都从韵律增强和多模态增强中受益，以理解发展较早的较简单意义，患有DLD的年幼儿童即使有这些线索也不太准确，并且多模态增强在年龄较大的儿童处理较复杂意义时对患有DLD的儿童特别有帮助。两个实验中的眼动数据显示，与正常发育儿童相比，患有DLD的儿童在身体和韵律线索展开后对看向目标图像的偏好不太明显，但多模态线索确实减少了儿童看向间接请求字面解释的偏差。我们的结果强调了韵律和身体线索对处理复杂程度不同的语用意义的重要性，特别是在语言能力受损时，并且对专业人员与患有DLD的儿童使用的沟通策略具有重要意义。
