Structural Relationship Between Cognitive Processing and Syntactic Sentence Comprehension in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

Purpose We assessed the potential direct and indirect (mediated) influences of 4 cognitive mechanisms we believe are theoretically relevant to canonical and noncanonical sentence comprehension of school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method One hundred seventeen children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched typically developing (TD) children participated. Comprehension was indexed by children identifying the agent in implausible sentences. Children completed cognitive tasks indexing the latent predictors of fluid reasoning (FLD-R), controlled attention (CATT), complex working memory (cWM), and long-term memory language knowledge (LTM-LK). Results Structural equation modeling revealed that the best model fit was an indirect model in which cWM mediated the relationship among FLD-R, CATT, LTM-LK, and sentence comprehension. For TD children, comprehension of both sentence types was indirectly influenced by FLD-R (pattern recognition) and LTM-LK (linguistic chunking). For children with DLD, canonical sentence comprehension was indirectly influenced by LTM-LK and CATT, and noncanonical comprehension was indirectly influenced just by CATT. Conclusions cWM mediates sentence comprehension in children with DLD and TD children. For TD children, comprehension occurs automatically through pattern recognition and linguistic chunking. For children with DLD, comprehension is cognitively effortful. Whereas canonical comprehension occurs through chunking, noncanonical comprehension develops on a word-by-word basis. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7178939

Relationship between working memory and complex syntax in children with Developmental Language Disorder

“…Still using a complex WM task (visual N-back), Weismer and colleagues (2017) found that WM performance predicts results in a grammatical judgment task, including omissions of verbal inflexions in complex sentences, in 30 children with language impairment (including participants with DLD and autism spectrum disorders; M age = 9;8). Finally, in a more recent study, Montgomery, Evans, Fargo, Schwartz, and Gillam (2018) found that complex working memory (assessed by two tasks involving concurrent processing and storage) mediates complex sentence comprehension (non-canonical sentences) in 117 children with DLD aged seven to eleven, whereas for canonical structures, these children seem to depend on long-term memory language knowledge.…”

“…Until now, such a link between complex syntactic abilities and working memory in DLD has received relatively little attention (Durrleman & Delage, 2016;Frizelle & Fletcher, 2015;Marinis & Saddy, 2013;Montgomery & Evans, 2009;Montgomery et al, 2018). However, the implications of the presence of such a relationship seem to be of the utmost importance in the understanding, as well as in the remediation, of difficulties encountered by children with DLD.…”

“…2. We evaluate not only the comprehension of complex utterances (as in Montgomery & Evans, 2009, Montgomery et al, 2018, or Marinis & Saddy, 2013, for passives), the repetition of such utterances (as in Frizelle & Fletcher, 2015), or the elicited production of a particular structure (as in Durrleman & Delage, 2016, for clitics), but we assess the complex grammar in all these modalities (comprehension/repetition/production). To do this, we use, for example, elicitation tasks and analysis of spontaneous production samples which yield different yet complementary information about children's production of complement clauses (Steel, Rose, Eadie, & Thornton, 2013).…”

Tracking Changes in Frontal Lobe Hemodynamic Response in Individual Adults With Developmental Language Disorder Following HD tDCS Enhanced Phonological Working Memory Training: An fNIRS Feasibility Study

“…The findings from this study raise the possibility that this shorter protocol might be an effective tool when used in conjunction with traditional therapy where the client receives a very short session of HD tDCS stimulation combined with working memory training prior to the therapy session to induce short term improvement in working memory that would enhance the therapy session. For example, results from a recent large-scale study indicate that phonological working memory is a major factor in the successful comprehension of both simple and complex spoken sentences in both individuals with and without DLD ( Montgomery et al, 2018 ). The findings from the current study suggest that therapy sessions with individuals with DLD that are focused on improving comprehension of complex grammatical structures might benefit from the use of this HDtDCS phonological working memory protocol prior to the therapy session.…”

A Comparative Study of Chunking Skills in Bilingual Children and Monolingual Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

“…덩이는 장기기억과 의 상호작용으로 생기는 단기기억에서의 용량 단위로 여겨진다 (Cowan, 2001;Miller, 1956). 이를 바탕으로 덩이짓기 능력은 개인 이 처음에 접하는 서로 다른 정보 항목(item)을 묶어, 더 적고 통합 된 단위로 처리할 수 있도록 도와주는 주요기능으로 (Montgomery, Evans, Fargo, Schwartz, & Gillam, 2018), 단어 또는 숫자와 같 은 여러 항목을 하나의 표상으로 통합하여 개인의 저장 용량을 확 장하는 역할을 한다 (Nobre et al, 2013).…”