Processing of Scene-Grammar Inconsistencies in Children with Developmental Language Disorder-Insights from Implicit...

Developmental language disorders (DLD) are often associated with co-occurring neurodevelopmental difficulties, including attentional or social-emotional problems. Another nonverbal domain, i.e., visual cognition and its relationship to DLD, is virtually unexplored. However, learning visuospatial regularities-a scene-grammar-is crucial for navigating our daily environment. These regularities show certain similarities to the structure of language and there is preliminary evidence for a relationship between scene processing and language competence in preschoolers with and without DLD. This study compared implicit and explicit visuospatial knowledge of everyday indoor scenes in older children, aged 6 to 10 years, of both groups.

We measured 'dwell times' on semantic and syntactic object-scene inconsistencies via eye-tracking and performance in an object-placement task, and their associations with children's language, visual, and cognitive skills.

Visual attention towards object-scene inconsistencies was highly comparable between groups, but children with DLD scored lower in a visual perception test and higher language skills were associated with higher visuo-cognitive performance in both tasks. In the explicit scene-grammar measurement, this relationship only existed for children with DLD and disappeared when nonverbal cognitive performance was controlled.

Our study suggests the existence of mild problems in visuospatial processing co-occurring with DLD, which is partly influenced by age and nonverbal cognitive ability. The acquisition of visual cognition and linguistic knowledge is an interactive, multimodal process where the perception of objects in scenes might affect how the words for these objects are learned and vice versa. A better understanding of this interplay could eventually have impact on the diagnosis and treatment of DLD.