Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) display impaired phonological and/or morpho-syntactic skills. To detect these impairments, it would be of value to devise tasks that assess specific markers of implicit linguistic competence. We administered a forced choice semantic categorization task developed in Italian (Belacchi and Cubelli in Journal of psycholinguistic research 41:295–310, 2012) for detecting the implicit use of grammatical gender markers in classifying epicenes names of animals: phonological and/or syntactic. Seventy Italian children with expressive-phonological DLD (mean age: 61.20 months) were compared with a same-size control group. Overall, the children with DLD performed more poorly than the control group. Also, the DLD participants used the phonological index to a significantly lesser extent, confirming their specific impairment in the phonological processing of words. The current study provided evidence for the status of phonological discrimination skills as a precursor of language development, and the value of using categorization tasks to assess implicit linguistic competence in children with DLD.

Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder

“…See Table 1. Further support for the findings by [28] was reported by [29], who standardized in Italian preschoolers the categorization task and [30]. It is worth noticing that the task previously described [28] assessed linguistic representations implicitly, that is not asking for any language performance, thus selecting and retrieving the correct determiner for each name (except the preliminary naming task, which represented a control on language production).…”

“…In line with the literature (see [4,13,14]), we expected the same pattern of answers in children with autism (without intellectual/language disorder) and in the TD group, that is, better biological sex categorization for lexical-semantic stimulus words, followed by phonological-syntactic and phonological ones. The syntactic stimulus words should be the most difficult to categorize [28,30]. In addition, we expected children with autism to underperform in the categorization of lexical-semantic stimulus words.…”

“…[29] standardized the task for Italian preschoolers, defining norms for children from 3 to 5 years of age. In a second study [30], it was investigated the implicit grammatical gender representation in children with developmental language disorder, who are usually evaluated via explicit language assessment (e.g., word/non-word repetition tasks). Interestingly, the results showed that while typically developing children were better at using phonological markers of animal names to categorize the photos, children with a developmental language disorder used phonological gender markers less accurately.…”

Language level predicts perceptual categorization of complex reversible events in children

“…Specifically, it draws attention to the significance of language level even in the context of apparently nonverbal semantic and visually based tasks, and to language comprehension levels in particular (given the role of the CEG in our results). Artuso et al. (2021) recently already found evidence from children with DLD that linguistic representations are accessed in an implicit manner even in purely semantic object classification tasks that make no requirements on the explicit use of language.…”

“…A simple hypothesis could thus be that mental representations of reversible events have to be isomorphic to exactly a structure of this type. There already is some psycholinguistic evidence, from both neurotypical ( Belacchi and Cubelli, 2012 ) and language-impaired children ( Artuso et al., 2021 ) that linguistic representations (e.g. gender morphology) are implicitly accessed even in tasks that impose no overt linguistic demands (such as a purely semantic task of classifying animals by their biological gender (male or female).…”