| Wie verarbeiten Kinder mit Spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (SSES) im Vergleich zu Kindern mit altersgemäßer Sprachentwicklung grammatisches Genus online beim auditiven Sprachverstehen? | | Projekt - Fak. 1 - Sonderpädagogik - Sprachwissenschaft |  | | Status: | abgeschlossen | | | Kurzinhalt: | The ability to decode the phonological, lexical and grammatical structure of a speech signal is an important prerequisite for language comprehension and as a consequence for a successful educational and psychosocial development. For most children the cognitive processing systems underlying linguistic decoding abilities develop easily in the course of first language acquisition. However, a subgroup of children affected by a developmental condition called Specific Language Impairment (SLI) does not show an age appropriate acquisition of linguistic decoding and language comprehension skills.
The purpose of the research project is to investigate online linguistic decoding and language comprehension strategies in four- to ten-year old monolingual German speaking children using eye-tracking technology. 60 children with SLI (experimentel group) and an equal number of age-matched children with age-appropriate language acquisition (control group) are supposed to participate in two experiments from the so-called Visual World Paradigm (VWP).
Basically, the subject groups will be asked to match an auditorily presented language stimulus (a phrase or a sentence) with two drawings. One of the drawings depicts the meaning of the language stimulus (target picture) while the other serves as a linguistic distractor. Eye-movements during language-picture matching, which are generally assumed to reflect linguistic processing, are recorded.
In particular, the receptive processing of grammatical gender during language comprehension will be examined. In many psycholinguistic investigations the acquisition of this grammatical category has been shown to constitute an area of vulnerability in children with SLI. However, so far research has almost exclusively been conducted on production and not on comprehension of gender information. The stimuli which have to be comprehended in the two experiments are structured in a way that efficient processing of gender information could speed up the identification of a target picture. In two pilot studies with primary school children without SLI we already observed this kind of beneficial effect of gender processing in language picture matching (Cholewa, Neitzel, Bürsgens & Günther, submitted, Bürsgens, Günther & Cholewa in preparation). Within the project we aim to validate and differentiate these observations and to in-vestigate whether children with SLI respond less sensitive or more slowly to gender information.
[kürzen] | | titel:
(andere Sprache) | How do children with Specific Language Development Disorders (SSES) process grammatical genre online in auditory language comprehension compared to children with age-appropriate language development? | | | Ergebnis: | Like many other languages, German employs a linguistic category called “grammatical gender”. In gender-marking languages each noun is assigned to a particular gender-class (in German: masculine, feminine or neuter) and other words in a sentence which are grammatically controlled by the noun are marked by particular morphemes according to the noun’s gender feature – so called gender agreement. Within psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension it is often assumed, that gender agreement might help to predict the continuation of a sentence on grammatical grounds and to reduce the lexical search space for the next words emerging within the speech signal. Thus, gender agreement relations may provide a means to make the comprehension process more effective and targeted. The aim of the current study was to assess whether monolingual German 3rd and 4th grade primary school children make use of gender agreement in online auditory comprehension and whether different gender cues interact with each other and with semantic information.
A language-picture matching task was conducted in which 32 children looked at two pictures while listening to a noun phrase. Due to features of the German gender system, the target picture corresponding with the noun phrase could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset on account of gender agreement relations. The predicitive impact of grammatical gender agreement on noun-phrase decoding was investigated by measuring the time course of eye-movements onto the target and distractor pictures.
The results confirm and extend previous findings that gender plays a role in predictive online comprehension of gender-marking languages like German, and that even primary school children are able to make use of this grammatical device.
[kürzen] | | | Projektdauer: | 01.11.2018 bis 31.05.2021 | | | Projektbeteiligte: |
Prof. Dr. Cholewa, Jürgen (Leitung) [Profil]
| | | | In Zusammenarbeit mit: | Prof. Dr. Thomas Günther; Child Neuropsychology Section, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, Germany | |
| | | | | Verweis auf Webseiten: | | | | Angehängte Dateien: |  | Günther, T. & Cholewa, J. (2016) Wie verarbeiten Kinder mit und ohne SSES grammatisches Genus online beim auditiven Sprachverstehen? Poster presented at 2. LingUnite Conference, 14.10.16; RWTH Aachen | | Bürsgens, A.; Cholewa, J. & Günther, T. (2019) Poster presented at the 20th European Conference on Eye Movements, ECEM 2019, August 18th - 22nd, Alicante, Spain |
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