Relative Clause Sentence Processing in Korean-Speaking School-Aged Children With and Without Specific Language...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Specific Language Impairment (SLI) affects language development in children.
• Understanding sentence processing is crucial for identifying language deficits.
• Relative clauses present syntactic complexity in language.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate online and off-line sentence processing in children with SLI versus typically developing (TD) children.
• To analyze sentence processing using Korean relative clause sentences.
• To compare processing efficiency and accuracy between groups.

Main Methods:

• Utilized online and off-line sentence-processing tasks with Korean relative clause sentences.
• Included 24 children with TD and 19 children with SLI.
• Analyzed response time (RT) data and comprehension accuracy using mixed-effects models.

Main Results:

• The SLI group showed different RT patterns compared to the TD group during online processing.
• The SLI group exhibited lower accuracy on the off-line comprehension task.
• Reading rates were comparable or faster in the SLI group, but overall efficiency was lower.

Conclusions:

• Syntactically complex sentence processing differs significantly between children with SLI and TD children.
• Findings support the syntactic deficit account in children with SLI.
• SLI is associated with challenges in both online efficiency and off-line accuracy in sentence comprehension.