2018 Sat Poster 6432

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Number marking helps children with and without Specific Language Impairment alleviate their difficulties with case marking alone: Evidence from object-initial sentences in German
M. Stegenwallner-Schütz, F. Adani

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have consistent difficulties interpreting non-canonical transitive sentences that are disambiguated by overt case marking towards object-initial sentences (OVS), compared to canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences (e.g., Lindner, 2003). Besides case, German allows disambiguation by number agreement (on the verb), but sentences disambiguated by either feature alone remain difficult to interpret for typically developing (TD) children up to seven years (Arosio et al., 2012). However, comprehension accuracy of younger children increases when disambiguating case and number marking co-occur (Stegenwallner-Schütz & Adani, 2017). The number facilitation is predicted by the structural intervention account (Belletti et al., 2012) when different number marking on the subject and object assist the integration of the subject-verb agreement relation. Children with SLI are sensitive to number agreement in English (Adani et al., 2014), but it is unclear whether this transfers to sentences where number agreement co-occurs with case. To clarify this issue, we investigated the comprehension of case-marked OVS sentences with and without disambiguating number agreement in German-speaking children with SLI. They are predicted to perform poorly on sentences that are disambiguated by case alone. We put forward the hypothesis that number agreement (with singular and plural subjects) will enhance the comprehension accuracy of case-marked OVS sentences.

Monolingual German-speaking children with SLI (N=27; mean age: 6;9), who were included after scoring below age-expectation on at least two standardized tests of a battery assessing both production and comprehension abilities, and their age-matched TD controls participated in an auditory sentence-picture matching task (see Figure 1 for example pictures). Test sentences were manipulated with respect to word order (SVO/OVS) and the number features of the NPs (and the verb) (Singular-Singular [SG- SG]/Singular-Plural [SG-PL]/Plural-Singular [PL-SG]), as exemplified in Table 1. Results (only comparing OVS sentences here, see Figure 2 for visualization) showed that the SLI group underperformed the TD group (GLMM, p<0.001). Both groups similarly showed greater accuracy in the OVS SG-PL than OVS SG-SG conditions (p<0.05), and no such difference was observed between the accuracy of the OVS PL-SG and OVS SG-SG conditions in either group (p = 0.78).

The study shows that the difficulty of children with SLI with interpreting OVS sentences substantially hinges on their ability to exploit case-marking for correct disambiguation from SVO. Similar to TD children, (plural) overtly marked subject-verb agreement can facilitate OVS comprehension accuracy in children with SLI, despite their morpho-syntactic deficit, as evinced from the standardized assessment. This result supports the structural intervention account (Belletti et al., 2012), suggesting children with SLI interpret the subject-verb agreement relation as expressed by plural features in German. However, a number facilitation was only attested in sentences with a singular object and plural subject. This number asymmetry may be driven by processing effects that make number misinterpretations more likely in sentences with a singular feature on the subject and verb (cf. Patson & Husband, 2016). The results indicate for children with (and without) SLI that the plural features within the subject-verb agreement relation alleviate their difficulties interpreting case-marked OVS sentences.

References

Arosio, F., Yatsushiro, K., Forgiarini, M., & Guasti, M. T. (2012). Morphological information and memory resources in children’s processing of relative clauses in German. Language Learning and Development, 8, 340–364. http://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2011.634691

Belletti, A., Friedmann, N., Brunato, D., & Rizzi, L. (2012). Does gender make a difference? Comparing the effect of gender on children’s comprehension of relative clauses in Hebrew and Italian. Lingua, 122, 1053–1069. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.02.007