Sentence-picture Matching Task Research Articles

When morphology is not enough: The acquisition of voice in monolingual Greek children and bilingual children with Greek as a heritage language

ABSTRACT The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual Greek and Greek-German bilingual children with Greek as their heritage language. This age coincides with the immersion of children in the education system. A Sentence Picture Matching task tested participants’ interpretation preferences when ambiguity arises in reflexives and (optionally) (un)marked anticausatives (reflexive/anticausative vs. passive interpretation); it also tested accuracy in passives compared to actives-transitives (passive vs. active interpretation). All children exhibited adult-like performance in reflexives. In anticausatives, despite their lower performance, they were qualitatively similar to adults, exhibiting knowledge of verb classes. Children’s preferences were predicted by age (active-morphology/ACT) and vocabulary (non-active/NACT), confirming the role of the mental lexicon in the acquisition of NACT anticausatives. The only difference between bilingual and monolingual children was in optionally (un)marked anticausatives, both in ACT and NACT, that was marginally predicted by age and grammar production respectively, suggesting that optionality affects bilingual more than monolingual children. In passives, children were less accurate than adults despite ceiling performance in actives-transitives. Bilingual children performed less well than monolingual children and performance was predicted by grammar and exposure. These findings reflect the difficulties of monolingual children with passives and their late acquisition which further affects bilingual development due to reduced input in heritage Greek.

The acquisition of the verbal passive: The role of verb type

ABSTRACT This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children’s performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that children perform better with passives of predicates that encode a result state, either because they tend to make better adjectival passives or because they have a complex event structure. Moreover, the UPR predicts poorer performance with long passives (i.e., those with a by-phrase) than with short passives, to the extent that construing an adjectival interpretation is more difficult when a by-phrase is present; the UFH predicts no difference between the two. Portuguese-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 8 years were tested on their comprehension of verbal passives of non-actional predicates and actional predicates with or without a result state, using two sentence-picture matching tasks. The results do not entirely fulfill the predictions of the UPR and the UFH: we replicate the delay seen in English with non-actional predicates, but no effect of the result state is seen in the case of actional predicates. We propose that the relevant aspectual property of the passivized predicate may be affectedness rather than the availability of a result state.

Comprehension of Ditransitive Constructions in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Plus Language Impairment.

This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a sentence-picture matching task on four patterns of Mandarin ditransitive constructions. Both children with DLD and children with ALI received significantly lower accuracy than TDA children in general and their most common errors were thematic role reversals. However, while children with ALI evinced a generalized deficit in all four patterns, only the comprehension of S1 (Subj. + Vgei + IO + DO) and S3 (Subj. + gei + IO + V + DO) was affected in children with DLD, with that of S2 (Subj. + V + DO + gei + IO) and S4 (Subj. + V + IO + DO) preserved in this population. Additionally, thematic role reversal errors were more dominant in children with DLD than in children with ALI who also committed a relatively higher proportion of Wrong Theme and No Recipient errors. It is concluded thatthe primary deficit of children with DLD lies in representing dependent relationships between the arguments and the verb as involved in thematic role assignment, but this is less critical in children with ALI, with their performance on the comprehension task possibly also related to other factors associated with the condition. To enhance the development of ditransitive constructions, intervention efforts for children with DLD and children with ALI could focus on strengthening the connection between each argument and its thematic role.

The comprehension of passives in Mandarin children with and without DLD: from the perspective of Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis

AbstractThis paper investigates the comprehension of long and short passives in 15 Mandarin preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;2–5;11 years), 15 Typically Developing Age-matched (TDA) (aged 4;3–5;8 years) children, and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) (aged 3;2–4;3 years) children by using the picture-sentence matching task. The results reveal that children with DLD encounter more difficulty comprehending long passives compared with short passive, that they perform worse on the comprehension task than TDA children and TDY children, and that this population is more likely to commit thematic role reversal errors and point to pictures with the incorrect agent (patient) than typically developing children. Given that Mandarin passives are Topic Structures, we maintain that children with DLD are insensitive to the edge feature of the moved element in long passives, leading to Relativized Minimality effect and causing the asymmetry between the comprehension of long and short passives. These results align well with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Errors found in the children with DLD in the comprehension task point toward impaired syntactic knowledge and the lexical semantic deficit.

The Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Autism: The Role of Executive Functions and Language.

Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children and in a group of age- and IQ-matched typically-developing children. The study also explored the way performance in relative clauses would be affected by the children's language and executive function skills. Relative clause comprehension was tested through a sentence-picture matching task and language was tested with a receptive vocabulary task. Executive functions were assessed through backward digit recall and a Flanker test. Object relative clauses were harder to parse for both groups than subject relatives, while number mismatch between the moved object Noun Phrase and the intervening subject Noun Phrase in object relatives boosted both groups' performances. Typically-developing children's performance in object relatives was predicted by both language and executive functions, while autistic children failed to use language and did not systematically draw on their executive functions in object relative clause comprehension. The findings suggest that relative clause processing in autism follows a normal developmental trajectory, and that difficulty with parsing object relative clauses stems from reduced language and executive functions rather than deficits in the children's morphosyntactic skills.

Diffuse glioma-induced structural reorganization in close association with preexisting syntax-related networks

Glioma in the left frontal cortex has been reported to cause agrammatic comprehension and induce global functional connectivity alterations within the syntax-related networks. However, it remains unclear to what extent the structural reorganization is affected by preexisting syntax-related networks. We examined 28 patients with a diffuse glioma in the left hemisphere and 23 healthy participants. Syntactic abilities were assessed by a picture-sentence matching task with various sentence types. The lesion responsible for agrammatic comprehension was identified by region-of-interest-based lesion-symptom mapping (RLSM). Cortical structural alterations were examined by surface-based morphometry (SBM), in which the cortical thickness and fractal dimension were measured with three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Fiber tracking on the human population-averaged diffusion MRI template was performed to examine whether the cortical structural alterations were associated with the syntax-related networks. The RLSM revealed associations between agrammatic comprehension and a glioma in the posterior limb of the left internal capsule. The SBM demonstrated that decreased cortical thickness and/or increased complexity of the right posterior insula were associated not only with agrammatic comprehension of the patients but also with the syntactic abilities of healthy participants. The fiber tracking revealed that the route between these two regions was anatomically integrated into the preexisting syntax-related networks previously identified. These results suggest a potential association between agrammatic comprehension in patients with diffuse glioma and structural variations in specific tracts and cortical regions, which may be closely related to the syntax-related networks.

Acquisition of Mandarin long passives by children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT This study investigated the comprehension and production of long passives (i.e. bei-constructions with an overt agent) in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Seventeen preschool children with DLD (1 female; mean age: 61 months old) and 23 typically developing (TD) children (6 females; mean age: 62 months old) participated in a sentence-picture matching task (for comprehension) and an elicited production task. Their nonverbal working memory (NVWM) was measured with the fourth edition of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. Results showed that children with DLD were less accurate and more likely to choose the picture with reversed thematic roles than their TD peers on passives in the sentence-picture matching task; in the elicited production task, they produced fewer target responses than TD children in passives. For NVWM, although that of the DLD group was lower than that of TD children, most children in the DLD group were within the average range. Furthermore, their performance on passives in the comprehension and production tasks was significantly correlated with their NVWM, which adds to the body of work suggesting links between complex syntax and working memory. However, the fact that NVWM could be preserved in the face of difficulties with passives suggests that this link may be due to NVWM enhancing performance during tasks with a high visual component, while it may not be underlyingly responsible for syntactic impairments in children with DLD.

Similarity-Based Interference in Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia: a Computational Evaluation of Two Models of Cue-Based Retrieval

Sentence comprehension requires the listener to link incoming words with short-term memory representations in order to build linguistic dependencies. The cue-based retrieval theory of sentence processing predicts that the retrieval of these memory representations is affected by similarity-based interference. We present the first large-scale computational evaluation of interference effects in two models of sentence processing — the activation-based model and a modification of the direct-access model — in individuals with aphasia (IWA) and control participants in German. The parameters of the models are linked to prominent theories of processing deficits in aphasia, and the models are tested against two linguistic constructions in German: pronoun resolution and relative clauses. The data come from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment combined with a sentence-picture matching task. The results show that both control participants and IWA are susceptible to retrieval interference, and that a combination of theoretical explanations (intermittent deficiencies, slow syntax, and resource reduction) can explain IWA’s deficits in sentence processing. Model comparisons reveal that both models have a similar predictive performance in pronoun resolution, but the activation-based model outperforms the direct-access model in relative clauses.

Optionality in semantic-pragmatic interface of bilingualism? Bare numeral constructions in Tibetan and Chinese bilinguals’ grammar

Bare numeral constructions (BNCs) can be anaphoric in Chinese but not Tibetan. Since the interpretation of BNCs requires a specific context, we consider it to involve a semantic-pragmatic interface, which has been argued to be vulnerable to crosslinguistic transfer for bilinguals (e.g., Sorace 2005, 2011). This study conducted a controlled sentence-picture matching truth value judgment task to examine whether Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals show crosslinguistic influence when interpreting BNCs in both languages. The data suggests that crosslinguistic effects did occur among some bilinguals. However, there were more bilinguals who successfully differentiated the two languages regarding the interpretation of BNCs. Our findings imply that early bilinguals may not necessarily show optionality in interface phenomena.

Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

The goal of the present study is to test the agrammatic comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus in Catalan, in order to evaluate the Generalised Minimality hypothesis of Grillo (2009). According to this hypothesis, the comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism is the result of the underspecification of scope-discourse features giving rise to generalised intervention effects. We conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks to assess the comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus with nine and seven Broca’s aphasic subjects, respectively, as well as control participants. The results show that the comprehension of SVO sentences and object clitics was preserved, whereas the comprehension of object dislocations and object focalisations was compromised. These findings are consistent with the analysis of the deficit as an instance of generalised intervention effects. Yet, we also examined the prediction that a relevant syntactic feature mismatch between the subject and the object would suffice to block generalised minimality effects; in particular, the number features of subject and object were controlled for. The agrammatic subjects’ performance on mismatched sentences did not differ from their performance on sentences where the subject and the object were matched in number. These findings call the hypothesis into question and stress the need for future research.

Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian

The current consensus in the literature of processing of relative clauses states that centre-embedded relative clauses introduce a heavy computational load. While this is well-established, most evidence for it comes from English, while the empirical evidence from many other languages is still lacking. Here, we try to fill this gap by researching the differences in the processing times of centre-embedded and right-branching relative clauses in Slovenian. We report results from a sentence-picture matching task, in which we observe longer reaction times and lower accuracy when the participants are dealing with centre-embedded relative clauses, compared to right-branching ones. This result provides important evidence in a so far largely under-investigated language, contributing to the theoretical claim that the difficulties observed in the processing of centre-embedded relative clauses are language-independent.

Structural priming from production to comprehension in aphasia

ABSTRACT Background Many people with aphasia (PWA) show deficits in sentence production and comprehension, in part, due to an inefficient mapping between messages and syntactic structures. Structural priming—the tendency to repeat previously encountered sentence structures—has been shown to support implicit syntactic learning within and across production and comprehension modalities in healthy adults. Structural priming is also effective in facilitating sentence production and comprehension in PWA. However, less is known about whether priming in one modality changes PWA’s performance in the other modality, crucial evidence needed for applying structural priming as a cost-effective intervention strategy for PWA. Aims This study examined (a) whether production to comprehension cross-modality priming is effective in PWA, (b) whether priming-induced changes in syntactic comprehension lasted in the absence of an immediate prime, and (c) whether there is a significant correlation between individuals’ priming effects and the change in their comprehension following priming. Methods & Procedures Thirteen PWA and 13 age-matched control participants completed a pre-test, a production-to-comprehension priming block, and a post-test. In the pre- and post-tests, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task with sentences involving interpretations of an ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., The teacher is poking the monk with a bat). Participants were free to choose a picture corresponding to a high attachment (HA; e.g., the teacher is using the bat to poke the monk) or a low attachment (LA; e.g., the monk is holding the bat) interpretation. In the priming block, participants produced LA sentences as primes and then completed a sentence-picture matching task for comprehension targets, similar to the pre-test. Results Age-matched controls and PWA showed a significant priming effect when comparing the priming block to the pre-test. In both groups, the priming effect persisted when comparing picture selections in the pre- and post-tests. At the individual level, age-matched controls who showed larger priming effects also selected more LA pictures in the post-test compared to the pre-test, indicating that the priming effect accounted for the magnitude of change from the pre- to post-test. This correlation was also found in PWA. Conclusions These findings suggest that production-to-comprehension structural priming is effective and persistent in PWA and controls, in line with the view that structural priming is a form of implicit learning. Further, the findings suggest that syntactic representations are shared between modalities, and therefore, production influences future comprehension. Cross-modality structural priming may have clinical potential to improve sentence processing in PWA.

Can the resource reduction hypothesis explain sentence processing in aphasia? A visual world study in German

Resource limitation has often been invoked as a key driver of sentence comprehension difficulty, in both theories of language-unimpaired and language-impaired populations. In the field of aphasia, one such influential theory is Caplan’s resource reduction hypothesis (RRH). In this large investigation of online processing in aphasia in German, we evaluated three key predictions of the RRH in 21 individuals with aphasia and 22 control pparticipants. Measures of online processing were obtained by combining a sentence-picture matching task with the visual world paradigm. Four sentence types were used to investigate the generality of the findings, and two test phases were used to investigate RRH’s predictions regarding variability in aphasia. The processing patterns were consistent with two of the three predictions of the RRH. Overall, our investigation shows that the RRH can account for important aspects of sentence processing in aphasia.

Processing and acquisition of temporality in L2 Mandarin Chinese: Effects of grammatical and lexical aspects.

This study investigated the second language (L2) processing and acquisition of Chinese temporality, specifically the interaction of grammatical and lexical aspects. An experimental group of 31 English-speaking learners of Chinese and a control group of 29 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese completed an online sentence-picture matching task and an offline translation task. Results from these experiments demonstrated the prototype effect: In aspectual development, perfective aspect started with telic verbs and progressive aspect started with activity verbs, in accordance with the Aspect Hypothesis, both for online processing and offline comprehension. The prototype effect of the grammatical aspect was evident for activity verbs but less so for accomplishment verbs in the L2 group across tasks, and this was explained through language-specific properties and L2 learners’ instructional input. In addition, L2 proficiency and working memory capacity were found to modulate these processes.

Cross-linguistic influences of L1 on L2 morphosyntactic processing: An fNIRS study

This study examined how the morphological typology of second language (L2) learners' first language (L1) affected neural processing of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. We used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine adult L2 learners’ processing of English Subject-Verb number agreement (e.g., duck swims, ducks swim) during a picture-sentence matching task. Two English learner groups with contrasting L1s, Spanish (with rich inflectional morphology, n = 16) and Mandarin (with a lexical morphology, n = 18), were compared to native English speakers (n = 19). Both L2-learner groups demonstrated comparable accuracy on the picture-sentence matching task. However, neural results revealed L1 influence on L2 morphosyntactic processing. Mandarin-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (L-MTG) for singular (e.g., the duck swims) versus plural sentences (e.g., the ducks swim). Mandarin relies on semantic, rather than inflectional, information to infer number and L-MTG is involved in lexical-semantic processing, suggesting L1 influence on L2 inflectional processing. Spanish-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in areas including the right MTG and prefrontal cortex for the plural versus singular sentences whereas native English speakers showed greater activity for singular versus plural sentences. The plural form is morphologically marked in Spanish and greater neural activation for the plural rather than singular form suggests L1 influence. Importantly, cross-linguistic influences were only observed at the neural level, revealing that different neural activation patterns underpin similar behavioral results. Both L2-learner groups showed different patterns of neural activation corresponding to the specific linguistic features of their L1, indicating that L2 processing is affected by L1 characteristics in linguistically principled ways. This study advances our understanding of how morphosyntactically-distinct languages are organized and processed in adult L2 learners.

Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of Motor Imagery (MI) training on language comprehension. In line with literature suggesting an intimate relationship between the language and the motor system, we proposed that a MI-training could improve language comprehension by facilitating lexico-semantic access. In two experiments, participants were assigned to a kinesthetic motor-imagery training (KMI) group, in which they had to imagine making upper-limb movements, or to a static visual imagery training (SVI) group, in which they had to mentally visualize pictures of landscapes. Differential impacts of both training protocols on two different language comprehension tasks (i.e., semantic categorization and sentence-picture matching task) were investigated. Experiment 1 showed that KMI training can induce better performance (shorter reaction times) than SVI training for the two language comprehension tasks, thus suggesting that a KMI-based motor activation can facilitate lexico-semantic access after only one training session. Experiment 2 aimed at replicating these results using a pre/post-training language assessment and a longer training period (four training sessions spread over four days). Although the improvement magnitude between pre- and post-training sessions was greater in the KMI group than in the SVI one on the semantic categorization task, the sentence-picture matching task tended to provide an opposite pattern of results. Overall, this series of experiments highlights for the first time that motor imagery can contribute to the improvement of lexical-semantic processing and could open new avenues on rehabilitation methods for language deficits.

Passive Voice Comprehension during Thematic-Role Assignment in Russian-Speaking Children Aged 4-6 Is Reflected in the Sensitivity of ERP to Noun Inflections.

Children tend to rely on semantics rather than syntax during sentence comprehension. In transitive sentences, with no reliance on semantics, the syntax-based strategy becomes critical. We aimed to describe developmental changes of brain mechanisms for syntax processing in typically developing (TD) four to six year old’s. A specially designed sentence-picture matching task using active (AV) and passive (PV) voice enforced children to use grammar cues for sentence comprehension. Fifty children with above >60% level of accuracy in PV sentences comprehension demonstrated brain sensitivity to voice grammar markers-inflections of the second noun phrase (NP2), which was expressed in a greater event-related potentials (ERP) amplitude to PV vs. AV sentences in four-, five-, and six-year-old children. The biphasic positive-negative component at 200–400 ms was registered in the frontocentral and bilateral temporoparietal areas. Only in six-year-old children P600 was registered in the right temporoparietal area. LAN-like negativity seems to be a mechanism for distinguishing AV from PV in the early stages of mastering syntax processing of transitive sentences in four to five year old children. Both behavioral and ERP results distinguished six-year-olds from four-year-old’s and five-year-old’s, reflecting the possible transition to the “adult-like” syntax-based thematic role assignment.

Comprehension of Mandarin Aspect Markers by Preschool Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markers zai- and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective -zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective -le and imperfective zai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs.

What Eye Movement Reveals Concerning Age-Related Dissociation in Syntactic Prediction: Evidence From a Verb-Final Language.

How older adults engage in predictive processing compared to young adults during sentence processing has been a controversial issue in psycholinguistic research. This study investigated whether age-related differences in predictive processing emerge and how they influence young and older adults' construction of sentential representations in a verb-final language using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm. Twenty-five young adults and 24 older adults participated in this study. They were administered a sentence-picture matching task under active and passive conditions during which their eye movements were recorded. Older adults showed a stronger reliance on predictive processing based on probabilistic constraints compared to young adults at the second noun phrase (NP2) for both active and passive sentences. Specifically, older adults showed significantly greater target advantage looks in actives but greater distractor advantage looks in passives before encountering the verb compared to young adults, revealing older adults' stronger preference for active sentence representations. This stronger predictive processing at the NP2 among older adults engendered greater reduction in fixation proportion on the target picture at the verb only under the passive condition, suggesting that older adults experienced greater difficulties with syntactic revision and integration in passives compared to young adults. The current findings support that older adults more strongly rely on predictive processing based on probabilistic constraints denoted by case markers when constructing sentential representation compared to young adults, and this processing pattern increases processing difficulties when their prediction is incongruent with linguistic input.

Ditransitive structures in child language acquisition: An investigation of production and comprehension in children aged five to seven.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Our data showed quasi-perfect performance in comprehension in adults and in those children who had already mastered ditransitives productively. However, children who had not yet mastered the production of ditransitives showed comprehension abilities preceding production abilities. Unlike adults, in the comprehension task children did not react explicitly before the end of the auditory stimulus.