How do prosody and gestures contribute to pragmatic processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder?

In this study, we investigated the benefits of multimodal cues for processing pragmatic meaning in children with and without DLD. Specifically, we tested whether children with DLD are more likely to benefit from prosodic and gestural cues than children without DLD when processing literal and nonliteral speech acts. A total of 39 children with DLD and 39 TD children aged 5 to 10 participated in a visual-world eye-tracking task. We designed two experiments, one per pragmatic meaning: literal speech acts (interrogative sentences) and nonliteral speech acts (indirect requests), and we manipulated the presence of multimodal cues highlighting the meaning of the sentence (prosodically-enhanced, multimodally-enhanced, and no-enhancement). We found that all children benefit from the presence of prosodic -and multimodal- enhancement when processing interrogative sentences, although younger children with DLD showed less accuracy in the task. In the comprehension of indirect requests, the multimodal-enhancement condition was especially helpful for older children with DLD. Eye gaze data revealed a higher proportion of fixations to Target images by older TD children. Our results highlight the importance of multimodal cues for the processing of complex pragmatic meanings when linguistic abilities are impaired.

本研究旨在探讨多模态线索对处理具有和没有发展性语言障碍（DLD）的儿童语用意义的好处。具体而言，我们测试了具有DLD的儿童在处理直义和非直义言语行为时，是否比没有DLD的儿童更有可能从韵律和手势线索中获益。共有39名具有DLD的儿童和39名同龄的正常发展（TD）儿童，年龄在5至10岁之间，参与了视觉世界眼动追踪任务。我们设计了两个实验，分别针对语用意义：直义言语行为（疑问句）和非直义言语行为（间接请求），并操纵了多模态线索凸显句子意义的存在（韵律增强、多模态增强和无增强）。我们发现，所有儿童在处理疑问句时都能从韵律和多模态增强的存在中获益，尽管具有DLD的年幼儿童在任务中的准确性较低。在理解间接请求时，多模态增强条件对年龄较大的DLD儿童尤其有益。眼动数据揭示了同龄的正常发展儿童对目标图像的注视比例更高。我们的研究结果强调了在语言能力受损的情况下，多模态线索对处理复杂语用意义的重要性。