Syntactic Gender Agreement Processing on Direct-Object Clitics by Spanish-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from ERP.

Paloma Roa-Rojas,Juan Silva-Pereyra,Thalía Fernández,John Grinstead,Mario Rodríguez-Camacho

doi:10.3390/children8030175

Abstract

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging evidence of this deficit can be found. In particular, we use the real-time processing technique of event-related brain potentials (ERP) with direct-object clitic pronouns in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Our participants include 15 six-year-old Mexican Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically developing, age-matched (TD) children. Auditory sentences that matched or did not match the gender features of antecedents represented in pictures were employed as stimuli in a visual–auditory gender agreement task. Gender-agreement violations were associated with an enhanced anterior negativity between 250 and 500 ms post-target onset in the TD children group. In contrast, children with DLD showed no such effect. This absence of the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect suggests weaker lexical representation of morphosyntactic gender features and/or non-adult-like morphosyntactic gender feature checking for the DLD children. We discuss the relevance of these findings for theoretical accounts of DLD. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of syntactic agreement processing and language disorders.

Highlights

The two most prominent non-adult-like phenomena involving directobject clitic pronouns in child languages, including Spanish, are the fact that typically developing children and children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) omit pronominal and full Determiner Phrase (DP) direct objects and that, when they do use them, there can be a failure of number and gender agreement between the clitic pronoun and its antecedent
Two of the prominent grammatical theories of DLD (Interface Deficit and the Computational Complexity Hypothesis (CCH)) predict that gender agreement errors should occur in children with DLD, though for different reasons, while a third, the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC), does not
The work that has been done using event-related brain potentials (ERP) on subject–verb agreement in children suggests that a smaller left anterior negativity (LAN) or P600 in children with DLD versus Typically developing children should be expected

Summary

Introduction

The development of direct-object clitics in Spanish and other languages has been the subject of much study. We will be most interested in non-adult-like agreement in children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD); we will briefly describe both object omission and agreement errors in typically developing children. In this way, we aim to distinguish the kind of error we are interested in from the kind that is less directly relevant to our theoretical claims

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