Word stress processing in specific language impairment: Auditory or representational deficits?

Abstract

Word stress processing has repeatedly been reported to be affected in specific language impairment (SLI) with potential consequences for various aspects of language development. However, it still remains unresolved whether word stress impairments in SLI are due to deficits in basic auditory processing or to a degraded phonological representation or both. We addressed this question examining an unselected sample of 10 children with SLI and 11 typically developing (TD) children, aged about 8 years, with respect to their basic auditory processing (duration and skewness discrimination) and phonological representation of prosodic (word stress) and segmental (consonant) contrasts. Our results show lower performance of the SLI group compared to the TD group in all tasks. Crucially, two subgroups of children with SLI emerged from our analyses: While one group was impaired in basic auditory perception, particularly affecting duration discrimination, the other showed no significant auditory processing deficits but a representational impairment.

Processing word prosody—behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for heterogeneous performance in a language with variable stress

“…The tasks testing for pitch and length discrimination were taken from the Seashore-Test (Stanton, 1928). Skewness discrimination was determined using the procedure developed by (Haake et al, 2013). The procedure was similar to the one used in the Seashore Test.…”

“…As prosodic feet are typically binary (i.e., containing two syllables which form a trochee, Knaus and Domahs, 2009), but heavy final syllables are parsed into non-branching feet, ultimate and antepenultimate stress can be seen as structurally similar in contrast to penultimate stress (Domahs et al, 2008, 2013b; Haake et al, 2013). …”

“…Haake et al (2013) found a significant relationship between auditory perception of duration cues and the representation of word stress both in children with specific language impairment and in typically developing children acquiring German. Heim and Alter (2006, 2007) provided EEG evidence that context stress, e.g., in a sentence, can be used as additional information to identify stress patterns.…”

“…Although interindividual variance in word stress processing in German has not been the focus of previous research, such variability has been observed (albeit ignored) in adult participants in previous studies (Domahs et al, 2008, 2013b). In a recent study, (Haake et al, 2013) reported interindividual variability in word stress processing in both children with specific language impairment and typically developing children. This variance was at least partly predicted by individual perceptual processing of auditory cues related to word stress (e.g., duration).…”

“…To this end, native speakers of German had to perform a variant of a sequence recall task, adapted from Dupoux et al (2001; see also Haake et al, 2013). Studies on languages with fixed stress using this task have shown that when demands on working memory increase, performance of speakers of such languages in reproducing pseudoword minimal pairs (e.g., míkuta vs. mikutá) decreases disproportionately (Dupoux et al, 1997, 2001).…”