Developmental Language Disorder as Syntactic Prediction Impairment
Arild Hestvik1, Baila Epstein2, Richard G Schwartz3
1Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, United States.
Frontiers in Communication
|March 3, 2022
Summary
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) struggle with predicting sentence structure. Unlike typically developing children, those with DLD do not show a brain response to unexpected sentence elements, indicating impaired predictive language processing.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects language acquisition in children.
- Predictive syntactic processing is crucial for understanding complex sentence structures.
- Previous research in adults indicated a specific brain response to prediction errors in syntax.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate predictive syntactic processing in children with DLD.
- To examine brain responses to "filled gaps" in sentence structures in children.
- To determine if children with DLD exhibit a prediction error signal during syntactic processing.
Main Methods:
- Children passively listened to auditorily-presented sentences with critical "filled gap" conditions.
- Brain responses were measured using electroencephalography (EEG).
- Filled gap responses were compared to control conditions and between children with DLD and typical development (TD).
Main Results:
- Children with Typical Development (TD) showed an early anterior negativity brain response to filled gaps.
- Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) did not exhibit this early brain response to filled gaps.
- This suggests a failure in predictive processing in children with DLD.
Conclusions:
- Children with DLD appear to have an impairment in predicting upcoming syntactic elements.
- The lack of a prediction error signal may contribute to difficulties in language acquisition.
- Findings highlight the role of predictive processing in DLD and language development.
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