Structural Relationship Between Cognitive Processing and Syntactic Sentence Comprehension in Children With and...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Sentence comprehension in children, particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD), is influenced by various cognitive mechanisms.
• Understanding these mechanisms is crucial for developing targeted interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the direct and indirect influences of four cognitive mechanisms on sentence comprehension in school-age children with and without DLD.
• To examine the role of fluid reasoning (FLD-R), controlled attention (CATT), complex working memory (cWM), and long-term memory language knowledge (LTM-LK) in processing canonical and noncanonical sentences.

Main Methods:

• A study involving 117 children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched typically developing (TD) children.
• Comprehension was assessed by having children identify the agent in implausible sentences.
• Cognitive tasks measured FLD-R, CATT, cWM, and LTM-LK.

Main Results:

• Structural equation modeling indicated that cWM mediated the relationship between FLD-R, CATT, LTM-LK, and sentence comprehension.
• For TD children, comprehension was indirectly influenced by FLD-R and LTM-LK.
• For children with DLD, canonical comprehension was influenced by LTM-LK and CATT, while noncanonical comprehension was influenced solely by CATT.

Conclusions:

• Complex working memory (cWM) is a key mediator of sentence comprehension in both children with DLD and TD children.
• Sentence comprehension in TD children is largely automatic, relying on pattern recognition and linguistic chunking.
• For children with DLD, comprehension is more effortful, with noncanonical sentence processing occurring on a word-by-word basis.