load and children's language processing

Fri Oct 29 11:32:57 UTC 2004

Dear Brian, Julie & Info-CHILDES,

there are some recent studies on sentence processing by children with
typical and atypical language development using a dual task - the
cross-modal picture priming experiment. In this task, children listen to
sentences (task 1) and while they do that, a picture is presented on the
computer screen. Upon seeing the picture, children have to perform a
decision task - for example they have to decide about the animacy of the
picture (task 2).

McKee, Nicol & MacDaniel (1993) used this task to study how children
process sentences involving pronouns and reflexives, Love & Swinney (1997)
used this task to study processing of relative clauses by pre-school
children and recently, we conducted a study to look at the processing of
filler-gap dependencies in relative clauses using a memory span task to
control for differences in memory capacity between the participants
(Roberts, Marinis, Felser & Clahsen, 2004). Finally, last year, together
with H. van der Lely, I conducted the same type of task with SLI children
(Marinis & van der Lely, 2004) to look at how they process wh-questions
on-line. See the references at the end of this e-mail.

The main finding of the above studies is that typically developing
pre-school and school children are slower than adults, but they show
reactivation of the antecedent at the position of the gap. For example in
the sentence 'John saw the peacock to which the small penguin gave the nice
birthday present [gap] in the garden last weekend', a priming effect was
found at the offset of the word 'present'. Interestingly, in our experiment
with typically developing children (Roberts, Marinis, Felser & Clahsen,
2004), we found an interaction with memory span for both children and
adults. Low span children and adults did not show this priming effect!

Children with SLI showed a different pattern. In sentences like 'Who did
Bob give the present to [gap] yesterday evening?', they showed no priming
effect at the gap. Instead, they showed a priming effect at the offset of
the verb 'give'. Importantly, SLI children's memory span did not differ
significantly from the memory span of the control group (that showed a
priming effect at the gap)! So children with SLI showed a different pattern
of processing, but this seems to be unrelated to memory span - at least for
the children we tested. We take that this result shows that SLI children
process sentences with filler-gap dependencies through a lexical-thematic
association between the verb and its arguments and not through a syntactic
dependency between the filler and the gap.

So it seems that both typically developing children and children with SLI
can handle dual tasks, and results can shed light into the way they process
sentences, but also into their underlying grammar.

Btw., the last 2 studies will be presented at the BU conference next week -
on Friday afternoon -, so anyone interested for further details and
discussion is welcome to attend.

With best regards,

--Theo Marinis

----------------------
References
----------------------
Love, T. & Swinney, D. (1997) 'Real time processing of object relative
constructions by pre-school children.' Poster presented at the 10th Annual
CUNY Conference on Human Language Processing, Santa Monica.

Marinis & van der Lely (2004). 'Filler-gap dependencies vs.
lexical-thematic associations in typical and atypical language
development.' Poster presented at the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human
Sentence Processing, Maryland.

McKee, C., Nicol, J. & McDaniel, D. (1993) 'Children's application of
binding during sentence processing.' Language and Cognitive Processes, 8,
265-290.

Roberts, Marinis, Felser & Clahsen (2004). 'Antecedent priming at gap
positions in children's sentence processing.' Poster presented at the 17th
Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Maryland

-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-
Dr. Theodore Marinis
Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Human Communication Science
University College London
Chandler House
2, Wakefield Street,
London WC1N 1PF
UK
Room 132
Tel. +44-20-7679-4096
Fax +44-20-7713-0861
www: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/DLDCN/staff11.html
-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^-

At 22:48 28/10/2004, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>Dear Info-CHILDES,
>     Julie Lewis from UBC asked me whether I could point her to some
> studies of the effects of processing load on language processing in
> children and I was surprised to admit to myself that I could not think of
> a consistent attempt to examine this issue.  Specifically, in the
> framework of the theory of automaticity espoused by Schneider and
> Shiffrin (1977) increases in processing load created by the imposition of
> a dual task (saying "kestral-kestral",  tapping your foot, counting back
> from 100 by threes, etc.) are supposed to have various interesting
> interactions with non-automatic tasks, but little impact on automated
> tasks.  There is, of course, the Gathercole and Baddeley work on
> phonological interference in list memory, but this hardly gets to the
> level of sentence memory or processing.  Moreover, only a small fraction
> of that work is with children.  Gupta. MacWhinney, and Feldman did some
> work with children with focal lesions, and Evans did parallel work with
> SLI, but never really focusing on dual tasks. Instead, most of this work
> uses work memory capacity as an individual differences measure.  Liz
> Bates and Arturo Hernandez did a nice study with load and adult
> bilinguals, but that is back into the adult literature.  Maybe people
> have just found that kids cannot handle dual tasks.
>    It would seem that processing load studies would be an excellent way
> of tapping into issues in the study of SLI and perhaps Dorothy Bishop did
> some of this, but I can't think of the study.
>   So, can any of you out there help us out with references or ideas.
>If these studies have not been done, either with normals or SLI, maybe it
>is time to do them.
>
>--Brian MacWhinney
>
>

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