Morphosyntactic Domain Research Articles

Assessment of Morphosyntactic Development in European Portuguese-Speaking Children

Objective: Studies on the late acquisition of morphosyntax in European Portuguese (EP)-speaking children are relatively scarce in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to report data on the morphosyntactic domain from typically developing children. The present investigation focused on differences in morphosyntactic performance according to specific demographic variables (e.g., gender, age, ecological setting, and socioeconomic background). Patients and Methods: Eighty EP-speaking children aged between 6 years and 6 years and 11 months were assessed with the Language Test - Preschool Language Assessment (TL-ALPE). Results: Within the age range considered, some receptive and productive competencies were acquired. Significant differences were found for gender and age. Conclusion: These outcomes contribute to the knowledge of late developmental processes in the morphosyntactic domain, in EP-speaking children, presenting well-established performance standards. The provided reference information is fundamental to accurately identify children with language impairment and to construct new valid assessment instruments.

Reproducing American Sign Language sentences: cognitive scaffolding in working memory.

The American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test (ASL-SRT) requires the precise reproduction of a series of ASL sentences increasing in complexity and length. Error analyses of such tasks provides insight into working memory and scaffolding processes. Data was collected from three groups expected to differ in fluency: deaf children, deaf adults and hearing adults, all users of ASL. Quantitative (correct/incorrect recall) and qualitative error analyses were performed. Percent correct on the reproduction task supports its sensitivity to fluency as test performance clearly differed across the three groups studied. A linguistic analysis of errors further documented differing strategies and bias across groups. Subjects' recall projected the affordance and constraints of deep linguistic representations to differing degrees, with subjects resorting to alternate processing strategies when they failed to recall the sentence correctly. A qualitative error analysis allows us to capture generalizations about the relationship between error pattern and the cognitive scaffolding, which governs the sentence reproduction process. Highly fluent signers and less-fluent signers share common chokepoints on particular words in sentences. However, they diverge in heuristic strategy. Fluent signers, when they make an error, tend to preserve semantic details while altering morpho-syntactic domains. They produce syntactically correct sentences with equivalent meaning to the to-be-reproduced one, but these are not verbatim reproductions of the original sentence. In contrast, less-fluent signers tend to use a more linear strategy, preserving lexical status and word ordering while omitting local inflections, and occasionally resorting to visuo-motoric imitation. Thus, whereas fluent signers readily use top-down scaffolding in their working memory, less fluent signers fail to do so. Implications for current models of working memory across spoken and signed modalities are considered.