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Cited by 11Language Development and DisordersNeurobiology of Language and BilingualismReading and Literacy Development

Developmental language disorder as syntactic prediction impairment

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Hestvik, Arild, Epstein, Baila, Schwartz, Richard G., Shafer, Valerie L.·2022·Frontiers in Communication
DOI 10.3389/fcomm.2021.637585PMC PMC8887879
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Abstract

We provide evidence that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are impaired in predictive syntactic processing. In the current study, children listened passively to auditorily-presented sentences, where the critical condition included an unexpected “filled gap” in the direct object position of the relative clause verb. A filled gap is illustrated by the underlined phrase in “The zebra that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose…”, rather than the expected “the zebra that the hippo kissed [e] on the nose”, where [e] denotes the gap. Brain responses to the filled gap were compared to a control condition using adverb-relative clauses with identical substrings: “The weekend that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose [e]…”. Here, the same noun phrase is not unexpected because the adverb gap occurs later in the structure. We hypothesized that a filled gap would elicit a prediction error brain signal in the form of an early anterior negativity, as we have previously observed in adults. We found an early (bilateral) anterior negativity to the filled gap in a control group of children with Typical Development (TD), but the children with DLD exhibited no brain response to the filled gap during the same early time window. This suggests that children with DLD fail to predict that a relativized object should correspond to an empty position after the relative clause verb, suggesting an impairment in predictive processing. We discuss how this lack of a prediction error signal can interact with language acquisition and result in DLD.

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Kessler KL, Martaharjono G, and Shafer VL (2004). “ ERP Correlates of Age and Proficiency in L2 Processing of Syntactic and Inflectional Information,” in Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 294– 305.
  2. Montgomery JW, Gillam RB, Evans JL, and Sergeev AV (2017). “Whatdunit?” Sentence Comprehension Abilities of Children with SLI: Sensitivity to Word Order in Canonical and Noncanonical Structures. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res 60 (9), 2603– 2618. doi: 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0025 PMC5831622 28832884 · DOI

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Authors
Hestvik, A., Epstein, B., Schwartz, R. G., & Shafer, V. L.
Affiliations
  • University of Delaware (US)
  • Brooklyn College (US)
  • The Graduate Center, CUNY (US)
Corresponding author
Hestvik, Arild
ORCID
Venue
Frontiers in Communication
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2022-02-09
Volume
6
ISSN
2297-900X (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3389/fcomm.2021.637585
PMC
PMC8887879
OpenAlex
W4211212735
Cited by
11
References
123
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1
FWCI
2.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Update notices
corrigendum (2022-05-03)
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Frontiers in Communication (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
National Institutes of Health (5R03DC006175)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
Keywords
specific language impairment, syntactic prediction, relative clauses, prediction error, passive listening, language acquisition

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