Self-Repair Timing of Lexical Problem Sources: A Window into Primary Language Impairment Online Processing

Abstract

Primary Language Impairment (PLI) is a disorder involving both cognitive and linguistic aspects. Indexes of this impairment emerge along conversation when PLI children experience lexical access and production problems, and display successive attempts to solve them by self-repair processes. This chapter focuses on the problem sources, repair strategies, delay markers, and time PLI children take in giving a repair solution at a lexical level compared to Typical Language Development (TLD) control pairs. PLI and TLD children’s repair solution time (RST) may be affected by the complexity of problem-sources being repaired (nominal, verbal or functional targets), repair strategy (lexical searches, replacements or lexical reformulations), and number and types of delay markers used. Analysis was realized on 12 h of conversations of six monolingual, Spanish-speaking Mexican children (ages 6;2 to 6;6, three PLI and three age-matched TLD children). As expected, lexical searches were longer in children with PLI (Mdn = 1910 ms, IQR = 970) than in TLD children (Mdn = 1195 ms, IQR = 3020). In addition, PLI group took longer to achieve a lexical target through elaboration (Mdn = 540 ms, IQR = 670) than children with TLD (Mdn = 380, IQR = 910). These results suggest that both groups do monitoring activities of the same focal aspects of language, but PLI children confine themselves to a more restricted dimension as syllable sequences. About lexical searches, PLI children do not conduct latent searches and abruptly interrupt their discourse to insert the item they had previously been unable to find. TLD group relied more on overt markers (isolated or joined), in contrast to the more frequent pauses and immediate elaboration repairs in PLI children. As for the differences in RST, although we did not find statistically significant differences between the groups, (PLI: Mdn = 453 ms, IQR = 717; TLD: Mdn = 400 ms, IQR = 957.5); (U = 1410.50, p = 0.779), PLI children took longer time intervals in preparing a repair solution in every grammatical category. This data could be related to the evidence of unsettled lexical-semantic representations in PLI scholars.