Language comprehension in children with Specific Language Impairment: an Eye-Tracking study

Abstract

[eng] Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show considerable difficulties in the linguistic production of verbal morphology marks and function words. The present study analyzes the capacity of children with SLI (n=24; age range 4:06-12), children with typical language development (n=48; age range 4:03-12) and adults (n=24; age range 18-30) to process the mentioned linguistic elements of the Spanish language in six online comprehension tasks. Simple sentences structures were used with the objective to reduce, as much as possible, the lexical difficulty in order to focus the analysis on the morphological dimension, with the minimum possible distraction. All the experimental tasks were based on the visual world paradigm which allows, through the technology of eye tracking, optimal conditions of psycholinguistic experimentation. Under the main hypothesis, the morphological characteristics of the linguistic stimulus guide the comprehension of the sentence and the visual analysis of the graphic scene. In this sense, it was expected that children with SLI would obtain worse results than children among control groups, considering the possibility of a deficit in the comprehension of the mentioned linguistic elements. The empirical data reveal that the children with SLI - in the present experimental conditions and in the context of the simple sentence - present a less atypical comprehension in comparison to the initial hypothesis. The results of the study allow us to suggest the possibility that the apparent difficulty in language comprehension of children with SLI follows a pattern where the accumulation of small processing difficulties in quantitative terms causes an impact in qualitative terms, which is manifested as a lower general comprehension. We suggest that the apparent difficulty in the linguistic comprehension of children with SLI might be more related to a pattern of accumulation of the difficulty, and less to isolated linguistic elements, such as verbal morphology and function words.