Binding theory and grammatical specific language impairment in children

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Child Language Acquisition

Background:

• Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (SLI) affects children's ability to acquire language.
• Understanding SLI requires investigating how children process coreference, particularly the assignment of reference to pronouns and anaphors.
• Binding Theory provides a framework for understanding syntactic constraints on coreference.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate intrasentential reference assignment in Grammatical SLI children.
• To explore the interplay between syntactic knowledge, lexical properties, and pragmatic inference in coreference resolution.
• To gain insight into the nature of Grammatical SLI and its underlying linguistic deficits.

Main Methods:

• A picture-sentence pair judgment task was employed.
• Two experiments assessed children's knowledge of Binding Principles A and B.
• Responses of Grammatical SLI children were compared to language-able control groups.

Main Results:

• SLI children and controls utilized conceptual-lexical and pragmatic knowledge for reference assignment.
• Language-able controls demonstrated appropriate use of syntactic knowledge.
• SLI children performed at chance when syntactic information was critical for ruling out incorrect coreference.

Conclusions:

• Grammatical SLI is associated with an impairment in innate syntactic knowledge, specifically Binding Theory principles.
• SLI children exhibit underspecified syntactic representations concerning constituent coindexation and pronoun properties.
• Findings support a modular language deficit model (Representational Deficit with Dependent Relationships) in Grammatical SLI.