Impaired implicit learning of syntactic structure in children with developmental language disorder: Evidence from syntactic priming

Maria Garraffa, Moreno Coco, Holly Branigan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Background and aims: Implicit learning mechanisms associated with detecting structural regularities have been proposed to underlie both the long-term acquisition of linguistic structure and a short-term tendency to repeat linguistic structure across sentences (structural priming) in typically developing (TD) children. Recent research has suggested that a deficit in such mechanisms may explain the inconsistent trajectory of language learning displayed by children with Developmental Learning Disorder (DLD). We used a structural priming paradigm to investigate whether a group of children with DLD showed impaired implicit learning of syntax (syntactic priming) following individual syntactic experiences, and the time course of any such effects.

Methods: Five- to six-year-old Italian-speaking children with DLD and typically developing age-matched (TDA) and language-matched (TDL) controls played a picture-description-matching game with an experimenter. The experimenter’s descriptions were systematically manipulated so that children were exposed to both active and passive structures, in a randomized order. We investigated whether children’s descriptions used the same abstract syntax (active or passive) as the experimenter had used on an immediately preceding turn (no-delay) or three turns earlier (delay). We further examined whether children’s syntactic production changed with increasing experience of passives within the experiment.

Results: Children with DLD’s syntactic production was influenced by the syntax of the experimenter’s descriptions in the same way as TDL children, but showed a different pattern from TDA children. Children with DLD were more likely to produce passive syntax immediately after hearing a passive sentence than an active sentence, but this tendency was smaller than in TDA children. After two intervening sentences, children with DLD no longer showed a significant syntactic priming effect, whereas TDA children did. None of the groups showed a significant effect of cumulative syntactic experience.

Conclusions: Children with DLD show a pattern of syntactic priming effects that is consistent with an impairment in implicit learning mechanisms that are associated with the detection and extraction of abstract structural regularities in linguistic input. Results suggest that this impairment involves reduced initial learning from each syntactic experience, rather than atypically rapid decay following intact initial learning.

Implications: Children with DLD may learn less from each linguistic experience than typically developing children, and so require more input to achieve the same learning outcome with respect to syntax. Structural priming is an effective technique for manipulating both input quality and quantity to determine precisely how DLD is related to language input, and to investigate how input tailored to take into account the cognitive profile of this population can be optimised in designing interventions.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-15
JournalAutism and Developmental Language Impairments
Volume3
Early online date21 Jun 2018
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 21 Jun 2018

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • structural priming
  • syntactic priming
  • implicit learning
  • syntax
  • developmental language disorder
  • specific language disorder

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