Learning of Grammar-Like Sequences by Children With Developmental Language Disorder: An Electrophysiological...

Area of Science:

• Neurodevelopmental disorders
• Language acquisition
• Cognitive neuroscience

Background:

• Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects ~7% of children, impacting mastery of nonadjacent grammatical dependencies.
• Difficulties with nonadjacent dependencies, like verb agreement, are a hallmark of DLD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate behavioral and electrophysiological measures of nonadjacent dependency learning in children with DLD.
• To compare learning and memory consolidation of grammatical structures between children with DLD and typical language development (TD).

Main Methods:

• A visual grammar-like learning paradigm (aXb/cXd task) was administered to 51 children (22 DLD, 29 TD) aged 8-12.
• Behavioral performance was assessed immediately and after a 1-week delay.
• Electroencephalography (EEG) recorded neurophysiological responses to grammatical and non-grammatical stimuli during the immediate test.

Main Results:

• Both DLD and TD groups performed above chance on the immediate test.
• TD children showed improved accuracy on the follow-up test, while DLD children did not, indicating limited consolidation.
• EEG revealed distinct neural responses to grammatical violations: a P600 in TD and a frontal N400-like activation in DLD.

Conclusions:

• Children with DLD exhibit immediate learning comparable to TD peers but lack long-term retention and rule abstraction.
• Distinct ERP patterns suggest that children with DLD may rely on familiarity-based associative learning rather than explicit rule-based processing.