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Real-time sentence processing in children with specific language impairment: The contribution of lexicosemantic, syntactic, and world-knowledge information

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2011

FABRIZIO PIZZIOLI  and
MARIE-ANNE SCHELSTRAETE
FABRIZIO PIZZIOLI
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain
MARIE-ANNE SCHELSTRAETE*
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Marie-Anne Schelstraete, Institut de Recherche en Sciences Psychologiques, Université Catholique de Louvain, 10, Place Cardinal Mercier, B-1348 Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. E-mail: marie-anne.schelstraete@uclouvain.be
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Abstract

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a lexical decision on the last word of a sentence. Thirty-nine children were tested: 13 children with SLI, 13 younger children matched on receptive vocabulary, and 13 age-matched children. We manipulated (a) the semantic fit between the target and the prime sentence, (b) the syntactic structure of the prime (syntactic vs. asyntactic), and (c) the lexical association between the target word and the prime. Despite being slower overall, children with SLI showed a significant priming effect. Syntactic information had a similar impact on thematic integration in control children and children with SLI, although the latter were more sensitive to lexicosemantic association and world knowledge than control groups. In addition, children with SLI appeared to use semantic information even when the sentence was asyntactic. The results suggest thematic integration problems in SLI: syntactic and semantic information contribute independently to the thematic structure but are not integrated to generate the emerging higher order representation.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 181 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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