DataSheet1_Developmental Language Disorder as Syntactic Prediction Impairment.docx

We provide evidence that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are impaired in predictive syntactic processing. In the current study, children listened passively to auditorily-presented sentences, where the critical condition included an unexpected “filled gap” in the direct object position of the relative clause verb. A filled gap is illustrated by the underlined phrase in “The zebra that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose…”, rather than the expected “the zebra that the hippo kissed [e] on the nose”, where [e] denotes the gap. Brain responses to the filled gap were compared to a control condition using adverb-relative clauses with identical substrings: “The weekend that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose [e]…”. Here, the same noun phrase is not unexpected because the adverb gap occurs later in the structure. We hypothesized that a filled gap would elicit a prediction error brain signal in the form of an early anterior negativity, as we have previously observed in adults. We found an early (bilateral) anterior negativity to the filled gap in a control group of children with Typical Development (TD), but the children with DLD exhibited no brain response to the filled gap during the same early time window. This suggests that children with DLD fail to predict that a relativized object should correspond to an empty position after the relative clause verb, suggesting an impairment in predictive processing. We discuss how this lack of a prediction error signal can interact with language acquisition and result in DLD.

本研究提供证据表明，发育性语言障碍（Developmental Language Disorder, DLD）儿童在预测性句法加工方面存在损伤。在本次实验中，儿童被动聆听听觉呈现的语句，其中关键条件包含了关系从句动词直接宾语位置处一处意料之外的填充式语隙（filled gap）。以"The zebra that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose…"一句中下划线短语为例，此处即为填充式语隙；而预期的标准结构应为"The zebra that the hippo kissed [e] on the nose"，其中[e]代表空语隙。我们将被试对该填充式语隙的脑电反应，与另一控制条件进行对比：该控制条件采用包含相同子串的副词性关系从句，例句为"The weekend that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose [e]…"。在此结构中，由于语隙位于语句后续结构中，同一名词短语并不会引发意料之外的加工效应。我们假设，填充式语隙将引发以早期前部负波为形式的预测误差脑电信号，正如我们此前在成人被试中观察到的结果。实验结果显示，典型发育（Typical Development, TD）儿童对照组对填充式语隙产生了早期（双侧）前部负波反应，但发育性语言障碍儿童在同一早期时间窗口内未对填充式语隙表现出任何脑电反应。这一结果表明，发育性语言障碍儿童无法预测关系从句动词后应存在一个与被关系化宾语对应的空语隙位置，提示其预测性句法加工存在损伤。最后，我们讨论了该预测误差信号缺失如何与语言习得相互作用，并最终导致发育性语言障碍。