Biomedical subjects

Patricia Deevy

Publications and source records attributed to Patricia Deevy.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Structural priming in children with and without specific language impairment.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: To determine if structural priming can be demonstrated in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). RESEARCH DESIGN: A mixed-model design was used to compare children with SLI to two groups of typically developing (TD) children, and to compare priming conditions. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Eighteen children with SLI and 36 TD children (18 matched on age and 18 matched on MLU) participated. Children were asked to describe drawings compatible with both a transitive or an intransitive sentence structure, after being primed with one of the structures. RESULTS: All groups of children were more likely to produce transitive sentences when they had just heard and repeated a transitive prime. Children with SLI did not differ from the other groups. CONCLUSIONS: Children with SLI show similar priming effects to TD children. Priming has promise as a method for investigating production factors in typical and atypical language development.

Case-Control Studies↗

PubMed2005

Interface problems: structural constraints on interpretation?

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits or restricts the interpretation of an already available set, rather than giving it a nonpresuppositional or existential interpretation, in which it introduces completely new entities into the discourse. Experiment 1 showed that readers prefer a presuppositional interpretation of three ships over the existential interpretation in Five ships appeared on the horizon. Three ships sank. Experiment 2 showed longer reading times in sentences that are disambiguated toward the existential interpretation than in sentences that permit the presuppositional interpretation. Experiment 3 suggested that the presuppositional preference is greater when the phrase three ships occurs outside the verb phrase than when it occurs inside the verb phrase. Experiment 4 showed that Korean subjects marked with a topic marker received more presuppositional interpretations than subjects marked with a nominative marker. Experiment 5 showed that German subjects in VP-external (but nontopic) position received more presuppositional interpretations than VP-internal subjects. The results suggest the syntactic position of a phrase is one determinant of its interpretation, as expected according to the mapping hypothesis of Diesing (1992).

Eye Movements↗

PubMed2004

The comprehension of wh-questions in children with specific language impairment.

Current theories of specific language impairment (SLI) in children fall into 2 general classes: those that attribute SLI to processing limitations and those that attribute the disorder to deficits in grammatical knowledge. In this study, the authors examined children's comprehension of subject and object Wh-questions because they offer the means of determining the relative contribution to performance of knowledge and of processing. Comprehension of subject and object Wh-questions presumably requires knowledge of grammatical movement. However, through manipulation of the length of the questions, it is also possible to vary the processing demands of the questions. If a simple deficit in knowledge of movement is involved, children should show poorer comprehension on object questions than on subject questions, regardless of sentence length. However, if processing limitations are involved, length should affect comprehension of object questions but not subject questions. Children with SLI and typically developing (TD) children matched on receptive vocabulary test scores participated in a comprehension task consisting of short and long subject and object Wh-questions. The two groups performed similarly on short questions, each showing high accuracy in both subject and object conditions. However, the children with SLI showed poorer performance on long object questions compared to long subject questions. They were also less accurate on long object questions than were children in the TD group. We argue that demands on linguistic processing abilities play an important role in the difficulties experienced by children with SLI.

Child↗

PubMed2003

The use of grammatical morphemes reflecting aspect and modality by children with specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of their use of previously studied morphemes in contexts that more clearly assessed the role of aspect. The children's use of less frequently studied morphemes tied to modality or tense was also examined. The children with SLI were found to use -ing to mark progressive aspect in past as well as present contexts, even though they were relatively poor in using the tense morphemes (auxiliary was, were) that should accompany the progressive inflection. These children were inconsistent in their use of third person singular -s to describe habitual actions that were not occurring during the time of their utterance. However, the pattern of the children's use suggested that the source of the problem was the formal tense feature of the inflection, not the habitual action context. The children's use of modal can was comparable to that of the typically developing children, raising the possibility that the modality function of possibility had been learned without necessarily acquiring the tense feature of this morpheme. These children's proficiency with can suggests that their bare verb stem productions should probably not be re-interpreted as cases of missing modals. Together these findings suggest that the more serious tense-related problems seen in English-speaking children with SLI co-occur with a less impaired ability to express temporal relations through aspect and modality.

Child↗

PubMed2003

Surface forms and grammatical functions: past tense and passive participle use by children with specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) use past tense -ed in fewer obligatory contexts than younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). In this study, the use of passive participle -ed (e.g., kissed in The frog got kissed by the kitty) as well as past tense -ed was examined in children with SLI, normally developing children matched for age (ND-A), and normally developing children matched for MLU (ND-MLU). The children with SLI used both past tense -ed and passive participle -ed in fewer obligatory contexts than bath the ND-A and the ND-MLU children. Only the children with SLI had greater difficulty with past tense -ed than with passive participle -ed. The pattern of findings indicates that the surface properties of -ed cannot adequately account for the past tense -ed difficulty shown by the children with SLI. However, the fact that the children with SLI were less consistant than the ND-MLU children in using passive participle -ed suggests that either the surface properties of -ed are responsible for a portion of the difficulty or these children have a separate, non-tense-related deficit in the area of verb morphology.

Child↗

PubMed2003

A method for examining productivity of grammatical morphology in children with and without specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show inconsistent use of grammatical morphology. Children who are developing language typically also show a period during which they produce grammatical morphemes inconsistently. Various theories claim that both young typically developing children and children with SLI achieve correct production through memorization of some inflected forms (M. Gopnik, 1997; M. Tomasello, 2000a, 2000b). Adapting a method introduced by C. Miller and L. Leonard (1998), the authors investigated the use of present tense third singular -s by 24 typically developing preschoolers and 36 preschoolers with SLI. Each group was divided into 2 mean length of utterance (MLU) levels. Group and individual data provided little evidence that memorization could explain the correct productions of the third singular morpheme for either children with SLI or typically developing children, and there was no difference between children with higher and lower MLUs.

Case-Control Studies↗

PubMed2002

Production operations and the use of nonfinite verbs by children with specific language impairment.

Recent evidence from structural priming studies suggests that children with specific language impairment (SLI) are more likely to produce verb morphemes such as auxiliary is when their previous sentence contained an auxiliary than when it did not. The same paradigm was employed in the present study to determine whether failures to include auxiliary is might be due to prior use of nonfinite sentences (e.g., The mouse eating the cheese). Preschoolers with SLI and a group of younger normally developing children were more likely to produce auxiliary is to describe target pictures when the preceding sentence contained auxiliary are than when it contained past tense. Use of is in the target sentence was least likely when the preceding sentence was nonfinite. The implications of these findings for current accounts of SLI and current models of sentence production are discussed.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Specific language impairment in Italian: the first steps in the search for a clinical marker.

Recent studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) have identified language measures that seem quite accurate in distinguishing preschool-age children with SLI from their normally developing peers. However, the studies have focussed exclusively on English, and it is clear from the literature that the SLI profile varies between languages. This paper reports on three studies designed to assess the utility of particular language measures for Italian. In the first two studies, it was found that a composite measure based on the use of definite singular articles and third-person plural inflections showed good sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing Italian-speaking children with SLI from their typically developing peers. The third study showed that the same composite can be applied successfully to individual cases of SLI. Some of the additional steps needed to evaluate this composite measure are discussed.

Case-Control Studies↗