Abstract
Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of spoken language, and can also present with motor, auditory, and phonological difficulties. Recent auditory studies have shown impaired sensitivity to amplitude rise time (ART) in children with SLIs, along with non-speech rhythmic timing difficulties. Linguistically, these perceptual impairments should affect sensitivity to speech prosody and syllable stress. Here we used two tasks requiring sensitivity to prosodic structure, the DeeDee task and a stress misperception task, to investigate this hypothesis. We also measured auditory processing of ART, rising pitch and sound duration, in both speech (“ba”) and non-speech (tone) stimuli. Participants were 45 children with SLI aged on average 9 years and 50 age-matched controls. We report data for all the SLI children (N = 45, IQ varying), as well as for two independent SLI subgroupings with intact IQ. One subgroup, “Pure SLI,” had intact phonology and reading (N = 16), the other, “SLI PPR” (N = 15), had impaired phonology and reading. Problems with syllable stress and prosodic structure were found for all the group comparisons. Both sub-groups with intact IQ showed reduced sensitivity to ART in speech stimuli, but the PPR subgroup also showed reduced sensitivity to sound duration in speech stimuli. Individual differences in processing syllable stress were associated with auditory processing. These data support a new hypothesis, the “prosodic phrasing” hypothesis, which proposes that grammatical difficulties in SLI may reflect perceptual difficulties with global prosodic structure related to auditory impairments in processing amplitude rise time and duration.
Highlights
Specific language impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of learning that affects the processing and production of spoken language (Leonard, 2014)
It is proposed that linguistic principles such as tense marking may be slow to mature in SLI (Rice and Wexler, 1996), or that there may be an inherited grammatical deficit linked to a genetic impairment in processing “extended” grammatical representations
Other theories propose that children with SLIs may have deficits in statistical or procedural learning, which compromise the extraction of implicit grammatical rules (e.g., Ullman and Pierpont, 2005), or that the primary impairment lies with knowledge of implicit rules for marking tense, number, and person (Gopnik and Crago, 1991)
Summary
Specific language impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of learning that affects the processing and production of spoken language (Leonard, 2014). The proposal made by Leonard and colleagues (the “surface” hypothesis) was that patterns of strong and weak syllables characterize all languages, and that children with SLI might have difficulties in perceiving less prominent syllables because of perceptual difficulties with sounds of short duration and low intensity These less-prominent syllables are often function words or syllables that carry grammatical morphemes. As shown by Leong et al (2014), accurate perception of prominent syllables, as well as accurate perception of the prosodic patterns of strong and weak syllables governing speech rhythm, depends in part on the temporal alignment of the modulation peaks at two AM rates dominant in child-directed speech, the “stress” rate of ∼2 Hz, and the “syllable” rate of ∼5 Hz. perceptual sensitivity to changes in ART at these relatively slow (in speech processing terms) temporal rates might be critical if children are successfully to detect prosodic prominence. Note that a successful perceptual approach to SLIs should apply across languages
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