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Dear Brian, Julie & Info-CHILDES,<br><br>
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). <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 '<i>John saw the peacock to which the small penguin gave the
nice birthday present<b> </b>[gap] in the garden last weekend</i>'<i>,
</i>a priming effect was found at the offset of the word
'<i>present'</i>. 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!<br><br>
Children with SLI showed a different pattern. In sentences like <i>'Who
did Bob give the present to [gap] yesterday evening?'</i>, they showed no
priming effect at the gap. Instead, they showed a priming effect at the
offset of the verb <i>'give'</i>. 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
With best regards,<br><br>
--Theo Marinis<br><br>
----------------------<br>
References<br>
----------------------<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
McKee, C., Nicol, J. & McDaniel, D. (1993) ‘Children’s application of
binding during sentence processing.’ <i>Language and Cognitive
Processes,</i> 8, 265-290.<br><br>
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
<br><br>
<br>
-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-<br>
Dr. Theodore Marinis<br>
Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive
Neuroscience<br>
Department of Human Communication Science<br>
University College London<br>
Chandler House<br>
2, Wakefield Street,<br>
London WC1N 1PF<br>
UK<br>
Room 132<br>
Tel. +44-20-7679-4096<br>
Fax +44-20-7713-0861<br>
www:
<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/DLDCN/staff11.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.ucl.ac.uk/DLDCN/staff11.html<br>
</a>-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^~^~^~^-^-<br><br>
<br>
At 22:48 28/10/2004, Brian MacWhinney wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Dear Info-CHILDES,<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
So, can any of you out there help us out with references or
ideas. <br>
If these studies have not been done, either with normals or SLI, maybe it
is time to do them.<br><br>
--Brian MacWhinney<br><br>
<br>
</blockquote>
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