Abstract
We provide evidence that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are impaired in predictive syntactic processing. In the current study, children listened passively to auditorily-presented sentences, where the critical condition included an unexpected “filled gap” in the direct object position of the relative clause verb. A filled gap is illustrated by the underlined phrase in “The zebra that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose…”, rather than the expected “the zebra that the hippo kissed [e] on the nose”, where [e] denotes the gap. Brain responses to the filled gap were compared to a control condition using adverb-relative clauses with identical substrings: “The weekend that the hippo kissed the camel on the nose [e]…”. Here, the same noun phrase is not unexpected because the adverb gap occurs later in the structure. We hypothesized that a filled gap would elicit a prediction error brain signal in the form of an early anterior negativity, as we have previously observed in adults. We found an early (bilateral) anterior negativity to the filled gap in a control group of children with Typical Development (TD), but the children with DLD exhibited no brain response to the filled gap during the same early time window. This suggests that children with DLD fail to predict that a relativized object should correspond to an empty position after the relative clause verb, suggesting an impairment in predictive processing. We discuss how this lack of a prediction error signal can interact with language acquisition and result in DLD.
Highlights
1.1 Syntactic DisplacementDisplacement is the perturbation of syntactic constituents in the service of various speech acts, such as asking a question, focusing on something, restricting the meaning of the referent, passivizing a verb, topicalizing a constituent, and so on
The current study examined whether children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) are impaired at predicting where the syntactic location of gaps should be, compared to their typically developing peers
The current findings revealed that when typically developing children listen to relative clauses like “the zebra that the hippo kissed. . .”, they generate the expectation that there should be no direct object after the verb
Summary
Displacement is the perturbation of syntactic constituents in the service of various speech acts, such as asking a question, focusing on something, restricting the meaning of the referent, passivizing a verb, topicalizing a constituent, and so on It is an indispensable grammatical mechanism in human language. Several authors have observed that children with DLD are impaired in the use of Wh-questions (Deevy and Leonard, 2004; Marinis and van der Lely, 2007; Epstein et al, 2013) and relative clauses (Fonteneau and van der Lely, 2008; Friedmann and Novogrodsky, 2011; Hesketh, 2006; Hestvik et al, 2010; Schuele and Nicholls, 2000; Stavrakaki, 2001, 2002), and more generally with non-canonical word order (Montgomery and Evans, 2017). The aim of the current study is to investigate a previously unexplored possibility, namely that DLD has its root in prediction mechanisms (see Jones et al, 2021 for a recent discussion)
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