Syntactic Difficulties Research Articles

Complex syntax and working memory in children with specific learning difficulties

Working memory (WM) limitations are frequently reported for children with specific learning disorder (SLD). However, WM capacity influences more than literacy and numeracy, as research highlights the contribution of WM to language development, in particular syntax. In this article, the authors study the effect of syntactic intervention, i.e. syntactic elements intervening between filler and gap, on comprehension in children with SLD and evaluate the relationship of this effect to WM capacity. Specifically, they assess how these children comprehend wh-questions and relative clauses. Additionally, they examine how comprehension relates to WM, measured by backward digit recall. The authors report that a subgroup of children with SLD struggle to comprehend structures containing intervention, and that WM capacity influences performance in SLD. Their conclusion is that computing a syntactic relation in which a moved object and an intervening subject share a featural specification taxes the processing system of children with SLD who have WM limitations. Thus, syntactic difficulties, although not typically associated with SLD, may form part of the SLD profile, especially when WM capacity is reduced.

Syntactic abilities and verbal memory in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA)

The aim of the current study was two-fold. First, it evaluated the influence of bilingualism on syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Second, it explored the relationship between syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with HFA and typical language development (TLD). Eighty-six monolingual Hebrew-speaking and bilingual Russian–Hebrew speaking children aged 4;6–9;2 years participated: 28 with HFA (14 monolingual and 14 bilingual) and 58 with TLD (28 monolingual and 30 bilingual). Syntactic abilities were assessed using Sentence Repetition tasks (bilingual children were tested in both languages). Verbal memory was evaluated using Forward Digit Span for verbal short-term memory and Backward Digit Span for verbal working memory. As a group, children with HFA scored lower than their TLD peers on measures of syntactic abilities and verbal memory. However, some children with HFA, monolingual and bilingual, showed intact syntactic abilities, while others scored at-risk for Language Disorder (LD). Importantly, syntactic abilities in children with HFA were not associated with their verbal memory skills. Furthermore, no differences in verbal memory were found between children with HFA who were at-risk for LD and children with no risk. Bilingualism did not influence Sentence Repetition scores when vocabulary was controlled for, and it did not affect verbal memory scores. The study demonstrated that (1) syntactic difficulties in children with HFA are not attributable to deficient verbal memory; moreover (2), regardless of languages status, children with HFA at-risk for LD exhibit impaired syntax similarly to those reported in the literature for children with Developmental Language Disorder. Finally, the findings show that bilingualism affects children with TLD and HFA similarly, demonstrating that bilingualism does not impede language and cognitive development in children with HFA.

Beyond Length: Investigating Dependency Distance Across L2 Modalities and Proficiency Levels

Abstract As an important index of working memory burden and syntactic difficulty, Dependency Distance (DD) has been fruitfully applied in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) to both native and non-native language production. Recent research has focused on DD as a predictor of writing performance across different proficiencies, while the other modality of second language (L2) performance – speaking – has been largely neglected. Moreover, while previous results reported significant positive correlations between DD and writing proficiency, a lack of control for important variables such as sentence/text length may have potentially inflated the outcomes of the analyses. In this study, we examine the effects of DD across the different modalities and proficiency levels, controlling for the effects of text and sentence lengths. Results from statistical analysis show that the mean DD of L2 writing is significantly shorter than L2 speech production, indicating that L2 writing may be a cognitively more demanding task than L2 speaking. Additionally, while significant statistical differences in DD were found across proficiency levels in both L2 writing and speech, the significance disappeared after controlling for sentence and text length. The implications of the present study for future research on DD in SLA are discussed.

Investigative Notes on Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s Translation of the Qur’anic Surahs’ Names

The Meaning of The Glorious Qur’an of Muhammad Marmaduke is one of the earliest English translations of the Qur’an conducted by Muslims’ translators and the first translation conducted by an English-speaking Muslim scholar. This translation of the Qur’an has been the focus of a number of studies that scrutinise it from different angles. Yet, there has been no thoughtful study dedicated to investigate the issue of Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’anic surahs’ names. Utilising the Contrastive Analysis approach as a theoretical framework, this study aims to fill this gap by assessing the accuracy of the equivalents provided by Pickthall to the 114 Qur’anic surahs’ names. The study consists of an introduction and five sections. It gives a succinct description of the Qur’anic surahs’ names, pinpoints the major features of Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’an, details his own approach in handling the Qur’anic surahs’ names, and analytically discusses the difficulties he encountered when rendering such vital terms of the Qur’an into English. The chief purpose of this study is fourfold: 1) to gauge the accuracy of Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’anic surah’s names, 2) to identify the difficulties encountered by him, 3) to pinpoint his own procedure (s), and 4) to advocate recommended translations and practical procedures. The study finds that Pickthall has been inconsistent and experiences a number of syntactic and semantic difficulties when rendering the Qur’anic surahs names into English. The study also finds that due to unjustifiable syntactic and semantic deviations, Pickthall conducts three types of translational pitfalls, namely: over-translation, under-translation, and erroneous translation. It is hoped that the arrived at findings are of fruitful benefit to the translators of the Qur’an and, by extension, to scholars of Qur’anic and Islamic studies.

The head the construct: Construct state nominals as a novel window to syntactic movement difficulties in hearing impairment

Children with hearing-impairment often show difficulties related to different kinds of syntactic movement. According to current syntactic analyses, Hebrew construct state nominals (CSN) involve syntactic movement, in which the noun moves to the determiner position. This kind of movement has never been tested in individuals with hearing-impairment. In this study we examined how Hebrew-speaking hearing-impaired children produce definite CSNs. A well-functioning movement of N to D prevents an overt determiner before the head of the definite CSN, and therefore we took the (incorrect) addition of a determiner before the head noun as an indication of a difficulty in moving the N to D.The participants were 32 children with hearing-impairment aged 9;1–12;2 whose performance was compared to 18 hearing children aged 8;10–10;7. We tested their oral reading of 63 CSNs in texts. The results showed that the children with hearing-impairment had a remarkable difficulty in reading the CSNs. The most noticeable error they made was that they incorrectly added a determiner before the head of the definite CSN, in addition to the determiner preceding the complement of the noun. The hearing control children virtually never made this error.Since the D position before the head should not be available if the noun had moved to D, we concluded that they could not properly move the noun to D. This illustrates, for the first time, a deficit in N-to-D movement in this population. The difficulty in N-to-D movement in the nominal domain is consistent with these children’s difficulties in other movement-derived structures in the clausal domain such as object A-bar movement and V-to-C movement. More broadly, these results support a movement analysis of CSN.

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm.

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject-verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., "the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away"). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age-matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations.

ASD Is Not DLI: Individuals With Autism and Individuals With Syntactic DLI Show Similar Performance Level in Syntactic Tasks, but Different Error Patterns.

Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0–18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8–14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2–18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group—the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance—the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed.

Spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia: working memory and vocabulary effects.

Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group differences can be attributable to cognitive differences between groups. Fifty-one college students with and without dyslexia were asked to produce sentences from stimuli comprising a verb and two nouns. Verb types varied in argument structure and morphological form and nouns varied in animacy. Outcome measures were precision (measured by fluency, grammaticality and completeness) and efficiency (measured by response times). Vocabulary and working memory tests were also administered and used as predictors of sentence production performance. Relative to non-dyslexic peers, students with dyslexia responded significantly slower and produced sentences that were significantly less precise in terms of fluency, grammaticality and completeness. The primary predictors of precision and efficiency were working memory, which differed between groups, and vocabulary, which did not. College students with dyslexia were significantly less facile and flexible on this spoken sentence-production task than typical readers, which is consistent with previous studies of school-age children with dyslexia. Group differences in performance were traced primarily to limited working memory, and were somewhat mitigated by strong vocabulary.

Assessing reading levels of health information: uses and limitations of flesch formula.

Written health information is commonly used by health-care professionals (HCPs) to inform and assess patients in clinical practice. With growing self-management of many health conditions and increased information seeking behavior among patients, there is a greater stress on HCPs and researchers to develop and implement readable and understandable health information. Readability formulas such as Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) and Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level (FKRGL) are commonly used by researchers and HCPs to assess if health information is reading grade appropriate for patients. In this article, we critically analyze the role and credibility of Flesch formula in assessing the reading level of written health information. FRE and FKRGL assign a grade level by measuring semantic and syntactic difficulty. They serve as a simple tool that provides some information about the potential literacy difficulty of written health information. However, health information documents often involve complex medical words and may incorporate pictures and tables to improve the legibility. In their assessments, FRE and FKRGL do not take into account (1) document factors (layout, pictures and charts, color, font, spacing, legibility, and grammar), (2) person factors (education level, comprehension, health literacy, motivation, prior knowledge, information needs, anxiety levels), and (3) style of writing (cultural sensitivity, comprehensiveness, and appropriateness), and thus, inadequately assess reading level. New readability measures incorporate pictures and use complex algorithms to assess reading level but are only moderately used in health-care research and not in clinical practice. Future research needs to develop generic and disease-specific readability measures to evaluate comprehension of a written document based on individuals' literacy levels, cultural background, and knowledge of disease.

Statistical Learning in Specific Language Impairment and Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Meta-Analysis.

Impairments in statistical learning might be a common deficit among individuals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using meta-analysis, we examined statistical learning in SLI (14 studies, 15 comparisons) and ASD (13 studies, 20 comparisons) to evaluate this hypothesis. Effect sizes were examined as a function of diagnosis across multiple statistical learning tasks (Serial Reaction Time, Contextual Cueing, Artificial Grammar Learning, Speech Stream, Observational Learning, and Probabilistic Classification). Individuals with SLI showed deficits in statistical learning relative to age-matched controls. In contrast, statistical learning was intact in individuals with ASD relative to controls. Effect sizes did not vary as a function of task modality or participant age. Our findings inform debates about overlapping social-communicative difficulties in children with SLI and ASD by suggesting distinct underlying mechanisms. In line with the procedural deficit hypothesis (Ullman and Pierpont, 2005), impaired statistical learning may account for phonological and syntactic difficulties associated with SLI. In contrast, impaired statistical learning fails to account for the social-pragmatic difficulties associated with ASD.

Analysing syntactic productions in semantic variant PPA and non-fluent variant PPA: how different are they?

ABSTRACTBackground: It is commonly held that individuals with the non-fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) show difficulties with syntactic production, but that the production of individuals with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is intact. Much of this evidence to date is derived from results of unconstrained language production tasks. There is emerging evidence however that the syntactic production of individuals with svPPA may not be as accurate as was previously thought.Aims: The goal of the current study was to investigate the sentence production abilities of participants with nfvPPA and svPPA (in comparison to matched control participants) using a constrained task eliciting syntactically complex utterances.Methods & Procedures: A constrained picture description task, which elicited active, passive, dative, and dative–passive sentences, was administered to three groups of participants (individuals with nfvPPA and svPPA and matched controls) on up to three occasions over a span of 2 years. Responses were scored and analysed using analyses of variance, crossing group and sentence type, for each of the testing times.Outcomes & Results: Results show that both the nfvPPA and svPPA groups demonstrated more difficulty with the passive and dative–passive structures compared to the active and dative sentence structures and compared to control participants, although the difficulties were more severe and were observed earlier for the participants with nfvPPA. Both groups also demonstrated difficulty with noun production, although in this case the difficulty was more severe for the participants with svPPA.Conclusions: The current group study provides new evidence of a syntactic production difficulty in individuals with svPPA, notably when complex structures are elicited. The source of the difficulty, whether it is due to a primary syntactic impairment and/or as an extension of the impairment to their semantic system, remains unclear. However, the impairment appears to differ from that of participants with nfvPPA. Further clarification of this syntactic production impairment can yield potentially useful information for researchers and clinicians in this field.

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading

How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty. Syntactic difficulty was quantified as syntactic surprisal, which is related to the expectedness of a given word's syntactic category given its preceding context. We compared words with high and low syntactic surprisal values that were equated for length, frequency, and lexical surprisal, and used fixation-related (FIRE) fMRI to measure neural activity associated with syntactic surprisal for each fixated word. We observed greater neural activity for high than low syntactic surprisal in two predicted cortical regions previously identified with syntax: left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and less robustly, left anterior superior temporal lobe (ATL). These results support the hypothesis that left IFG and ATL play a central role in syntactic analysis during language comprehension. More generally, the results suggest a broader cortical network associated with syntactic prediction that includes increased activity in bilateral IFG and insula, as well as fusiform and right lingual gyri.

Object-Clitic Agreement in Croatian: An ERP Study*

The present experiment was designed to open a discussion on the processing of anaphoric clitics in Croatian. The aim of the experiment was to examine the role of long-distance anaphoric relations and local structural case constraints during pronoun interpretation. On-line processing of cliticized direct-object pronouns embedded in a sentence context was examined using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Pronominal clitics were either morphologically correct or incorrect. Incorrect pronoun forms contained a gender violation, a case violation, or a violation of both gender and case. Electrophysiological response to each of the violation types was measured at the clitic site and at the sentence-final word and compared to activity in the control condition. The results indicate that, as attested in previous studies in other languages, there are functional and temporal differences between the processing of gender and case violations in pronouns. Whereas gender violations elicit late positivity, i.e., the component related to the processing of syntactic difficulties, case violations elicit a biphasic response in the form of early negativity followed by late positivity. A similar ERP effect is observed with double violations as well, albeit with a different distribution of the early negativity. The appearance of early negativities with case violations confirms previous findings on the rapidity of local syntactic processing as compared to the processing of long-distance anaphoric dependencies. At the end of the sentence, the typical wrap-up effect that reflects final semantic integration is replaced by the component related to syntactic reanalysis and repair.

Parallel Functioning Hypothesis to Explain Pronoun Resolution and Processing Load: Evidence from Eye-tracking

Although the pronoun resolution mechanism has not been clearly defined, research in language acquisition, computation, and production has proposed various explanations for it in various languages. Among these models, the Parallel Function Hypothesis (PF) suggested that in a complex sentence, if the co-referential noun phrases are in the same grammatical functional category, the Parallel Function Pronoun Resolution (PFR), the statement is easier to process than the Non-parallel Function Pronoun (non-PFR) Resolution. In the current paper, we studied the processing times of these pronouns through eye-tracking methodology, and compared the first fixation, total fixation and difficulty level of PFR and non-PFR pronouns, as explained in the PF for pronoun referencing mechanism. In the Eye-mind Assumption (EMA), Just and Carpenter suggested that a person’s attention could be followed through the visual display in eye movement recordings, in which the duration of fixation on a word was interpreted as the processing of information. In other words, the difficulty in processing could be manifested on eye tracking data, especially on fixations. It was also clearly put forward that the eye tracking data revealed information on information processing regarding syntactic processing difficulty. The results of the current study suggested that pronouns which were resolved to a noun phrase which had a similar grammatical function were fixated less than pronouns which were resolved to a noun which had a different grammatical function. Unlike first fixation durations, total fixation durations of PFR pronouns were significantly shorter than those of non-PFR pronouns. Therefore, in terms of syntactic processing load, it could be stated that our findings clearly illustrated that non-parallel pronoun resolution involves more processing load than parallel resolution.

The effect of lexical deficits on narrative disturbances in fluent aphasia

Background: The label “fluent aphasia” applies to different aphasic syndromes characterised by fluent speech with difficulties in lexical retrieval and/or grammatical processing.Aims: This study aims at investigating microlinguistic and macrolinguistic skills in persons with fluent aphasia. We hypothesised that their lexical and syntactic (i.e., microlinguistic) difficulties would affect also their narrative (i.e., macrolinguistic) skills.Methods & Procedures: Growing evidence shows that traditional tests may not be sensitive enough to capture the patterns of the linguistic impairments observed in these persons. Therefore, we used a narrative task to elicit linguistic samples. Spontaneous speech was elicited through a picture description task. The narrative samples were analysed with a multilevel approach that allows clinicians to quantify their productivity levels as well as their lexical, grammatical, and narrative skills. The spontaneous speech produced by a group of 20 persons with fluent aphasia was compared to that of a group of 20 healthy participants. All participants with aphasia were in the phase of neurological stability. The two groups were matched for age and level of formal education.Outcomes & Results: Results showed that the lexical impairment observed in the group of participants with fluent aphasia hampered the ability to produce well-formed sentences that, in turn, lowered the levels of cohesion of their narrative samples. Furthermore, the reduced levels of lexical informativeness were found correlated also to the production of errors of global coherence.Conclusions: These findings support the hypothesis that in these patients, microlinguistic difficulties might affect macrolinguistic processing. Furthermore, these results stress the importance of a multilevel approach to assess linguistic skills in patients with fluent aphasia, as it assesses both microlinguistic and macrolinguistic dimensions in parallel. Therefore, it allows linguists, psychologists, and clinicians to observe how the linguistic levels interact during natural language processing.

Deficit in Phonological Working Memory: A Psycholinguistic Marker in Portuguese Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment?

Among the disorders of language, the disorder known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has aroused the interest of many researchers due to the peculiarity of this disorder, which refers to the great difficulty in developing language skills in the absence of hearing impairment, motor deficit, mental retardation, brain damage, broad development disorders, acquired brain injuries and restricted social interaction. Some researchers have demonstrated that subjects with SLI have deficits in short-term memory skills and the phonological component of working memory leading to semantic and syntactic difficulties. The aim of the study was to compare the performance of children with SLI and normal children using the phonological working memory (PWM) test and verify if there is an association between performance on this test and a test that assesses reading and writing in children with SLI. We selected 44 school children, whose ages ranged between seven and 10 years old, 22 of whom had SLI—Study Group (SG)—and 22 with typical language development (TLD). All subjects were subjected to the Phonological Working Memory Test and Measures Analysis of Reading and Writing. For statistical analysis, we used the Chi-square test. Data analysis showed that children in the SG performed worse than the CG in all the tests that evaluated the PWM indicating that Portuguese speaking children with SLI have a significant gap in their PWM and that this gap can explain the difficulties with oral language. Data analysis showed an association between the nonword repetition test and reading text, dictation and spontaneous writing, suggesting that the difficulties encountered in the field of written language in children with SLI may be connected, even in part, to difficulties in the PWM.

The production of relative clauses by Italian cochlear-implanted and hearing children

This study investigates the elicited production of subject (SRs) and object relatives (ORs) in Italian by 13 cochlear-implanted (CI) children (age: 7;9–10;8) to determine whether and to what extent they differ from three groups of 13 normal hearing (NH) children matched on morphosyntactic abilities (age: 5;0–7;9), chronological age (age: 7;5–10;3), and auditory age (e.g. duration of CI use (age: 4;11–9;4)) respectively.Results showed that for CI children, SRs are more accurate than ORs. The same asymmetry is observed in all NH groups, although NH children's percentages of target responses are higher for both sentence typologies.The syntactic difficulty with ORs led CI and NH groups to adopt a considerable number of answering strategies: among them, production of passive relatives, causative constructions, and wh- elements replacing the complementizer che (‘that’).Individual performance variability within the CI group is observed. Some CI children showed good competence in Italian and age-peer performance by producing passive relatives, which are largely attested in older children's production. For other CI children, however, the tendency to produce sentences attested in young children's production is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment. In this case, the performance of these CI children was comparable to that of younger NH children.

Evaluación de la legibilidad de webs de universidades

Readability refers to the ease of reading and understanding a text. The need to ensure the readability of Web pages is related to universal access to products and services in the information society, which aims to provide an Internet for all. This article describes a study conducted to assess the readability of textual contents of Web portals of 40 universities at the top positions in international university rankings to determine whether the best universities have readable web pages. Mathematical formulas that evaluate syntactic difficulty of text oriented to texts written in English or in Spanish were applied.

„O Heiland reiß die Himmel auf“ Zu Textkritik, Syntax und Semantik von Jes 45,8

Abstract Isa 45:8 presents various textcritical, syntactic and semantic difficulties. The problems with the numerus could be solved by a different syntactic structure of the sentences. To get a syntactically well-balanced verse, only a minor textcritical correction has to be done: “The earth will open, and relief and justice will break forth. It (= the earth) will let (them) sprout together”.

“Prudentius Psychomachia 317”

Abstract The Latin text at Prudentius, Psychomachia 317 presents some syntactical difficulties, mostly stemming from the unexpected word quia. The manuscripts and glossa vetus offer little help on the matter. Gilbert Wakefield offered a convincing solution to the problem in a note that was buried in an edition of Lucretius that he edited in 1797. No subsequent editor of Prudentius has noticed his emendation, which should be revived and included in future editions.