Predictive Use of Grammatical Gender During Noun Phrase Decoding: An Eye-Tracking Study With German Children With...

Predictive language comprehension has become a major topic in psycholinguistic research. The study described in this article aims to investigate if German children with developmental language disorder (DLD) use grammatical gender agreement to predict the continuation of noun phrases in the same way as it has been observed for typically developing (TD) children. The study also seeks to differentiate between specific and general deficits in predictive processing by exploring the anticipatory use of semantic information. Additionally, the research examines whether the processing of gender and semantic information varies with the speed of stimulus presentation.

The study included 30 children with DLD (average age = 8.7 years) and 26 TD children (average age = 8.4 years) who participated in a visual-world eye-tracking study. Noun phrases, consisting of an article, an adjective, and a noun, were presented that matched with only one of two target pictures. The phrases contained a gender cue, a semantic cue, a combination of both, or none of these cues. The cues were provided by the article and/or adjective and could be used to identify the target picture before the noun itself was presented.

Both groups, TD children and those with DLD, utilized predictive processing strategies in response to gender agreement and semantic information when decoding noun phrases. However, children with DLD were only able to consider gender cues when noun phrases were presented at a slower speech rate, and even then, their predictive certainty remained below the typical level for their age.

Based on these findings, the article discusses the potential relevance of the prediction framework for explaining comprehension deficits in children with DLD, as well as the clinical implications of the results.