Abstract
Our visual environment is highly predictable in terms of where and in which locations objects can be found. Based on visual experience, children extract rules about visual scene configurations, allowing them to generate scene knowledge. Similarly, children extract the linguistic rules from relatively predictable linguistic contexts. It has been proposed that the capacity of extracting rules from both domains might share some underlying cognitive mechanisms. In the present study, we investigated the link between language and scene knowledge development. To do so, we assessed whether preschool children (age range = 5;4–6;6) with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who present several difficulties in the linguistic domain, are equally attracted to object-scene inconsistencies in a visual free-viewing task in comparison with age-matched children with Typical Language Development (TLD). All children explored visual scenes containing semantic (e.g., soap on a breakfast table), syntactic (e.g., bread on the chair back), or both inconsistencies (e.g., soap on the chair back). Since scene knowledge interacts with image properties (i.e., saliency) to guide gaze allocation during visual exploration from the early stages of development, we also included the objects’ saliency rank in the analysis. The results showed that children with DLD were less attracted to semantic and syntactic inconsistencies than children with TLD. In addition, saliency modulated syntactic effect only in the group of children with TLD. Our findings indicate that children with DLD do not activate scene knowledge to guide visual attention as efficiently as children with TLD, especially at the syntactic level, suggesting a link between scene knowledge and language development.
Highlights
Our surrounding visual environment provides a rich and predictable context with typical configurations
Öhlschläger and Võ (2020) examined sceneknowledge guidance in children between 2 and 4 years old by measuring looking time to scene-object inconsistencies. They showed that inconsistency effects were observable in 4-year-olds. These findings suggest that scene knowledge is available to guide visual attention by age four
The LMER analysis showed for both groups only significantly longer looking time to the semantic-syntactic trials object (DLD: β = 0.351, se = 0.169, t = 2.079, p = 0.041; Typical Language Development (TLD): β = 0.342, se = 0.164, t = 2.080, p = 0.041) relative to the typical trials object in this measure
Summary
Our surrounding visual environment provides a rich and predictable context with typical configurations. According to the cognitive guidance theory (Henderson and Hayes, 2017; Henderson et al, 2018), an internal representation of scenes (i.e., scene knowledge) guides visual attention during scene exploration, and gaze is often directed to regions that are relevant either for scene understanding or for achieving a task goal (Loftus and Mackworth, 1978; De Graef et al, 1990; Einhäuser et al, 2008; Castelhano et al, 2009; Võ and Henderson, 2009, 2011; Mills et al, 2011) In this context, evidence has shown that both, semantics (e.g., a sock in the kitchen; De Graef et al, 1990; Henderson et al, 1999; Võ and Henderson, 2009) and syntactic (e.g., a saucepan on the floor; De Graef et al, 1990; Võ and Henderson, 2009; Öhlschläger and Võ, 2017; Võ et al, 2019) scene-object inconsistencies strongly influence gaze allocation, attracting the gaze of observers and increasing the number of fixation landings and looking times. We propose that if semantic and syntactic processing in the visual and language domain share some underlying cognitive mechanisms, children with DLD would show difficulties in object-scene violation detection, at the syntactic level since grammar is a hallmark of this disorder
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