Language comprehension is a complex process that depends on accurate linguistic and cognitive proces

1
Introduction

• Language comprehension is a complex process that
  depends on accurate linguistic and cognitive
  processing abilities. It involves not only
  phonological, semantic, lexical and
  morphosyntactic knowledge, but also good working
  memory abilities to refresh verbal material
  during information processing.
• Quality and strength of knowledge are critical
  for speed and accuracy of language processing
  well established linguistic knowledge can be
  rapidly processed and is less dependent on
  working memory abilities emergent linguistic
  knowledge require more language processing
  demands and, therefore, rely more on working
  memory capacity.

2
Introduction

• Childrens language development
• Canonical word order knowledge seems to emerge
  early in typical language development and can be
  considered a well established knowledge at 4
  years of age.
• For Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children,
  number grammatical morpheme is acquired later in
  development, being mastered at around 5 years of
  age.
• Childrens abilities to show linguistic
  knowledge can vary depending on the amount of
  processing demands consistent knowledge will be
  less or will not be influenced by task
  complexity, whereas emergent knowledge will be
  impaired as a function of increasing task
  complexity.

3
Purpose

• The aim of this study was to analyze Brazilian
  childrens performance in a sentence
  comprehension test comprised of four levels of
  syntactic complexity. Although sentences could
  differ in grammatical complexity, all stimuli
  used the same linguistic variables as critical
  information for sentence understanding canonical
  word order1 and number grammatical morpheme2.

4
Methods

• This research was approved by the Ethics
  Committee for the Analysis of Research Protocols
  of the HC-FMUSP Brazil (CAPPesq nº 226/05)
  and all participants had their informed consent
  signed.
• Participants
• Ninety-six Brazilian children with typical
  language development aged 40 to 611
  (yearsmonths) participated on this study1.
  Inclusion criteria were normal performance on
  Expressive Vocabulary (Befi-Lopes, 2004) and
  Phonology (Wertzner, 2004) Assessments and no
  parental or teachers complaints regarding
  childrens language development.

5
Methods

• Material
• Forty-eight reversible sentences in active voice
• All sentences had animated clause elements and
  action verbs
• All sentences had one of the clause elements
  (subject or object) in the singular and the other
  one in the plural form
• Four different syntactic complexity levels
• Level A - sentences with a single clause that
  described one action
• Level B - sentences with a main clause a
  relative clause that described one action (levels
  A and B shared same visual stimuli)
• Level C - sentences with a single clause a
  coordinate clause that described two actions
• Level D - sentences with a main clause a
  relative clause that described two actions
  (levels C and D shared same visual stimuli).
• Isolated Singular and Plural measures.

6
Methods

• Procedure
• Children were encouraged to point to the picture
  that correctly represented the sentence spoken by
  the examiner, among four possibilities one
  target-picture (T) and three foils. Foils were
  designed to allow the analysis of different kinds
  of errors
• Number error (N) correct selection of
  agent/patient but incorrect understanding of
  singular/plural information
• Word Order error (WO) incorrect selection of
  agent/patient but correct understanding of
  singular/plural information
• Both Number and Word Order errors (N-WO)
  incorrect understanding of agent/patient and
  singular/plural information.

7
Methods

• Analysis
• Data were statistically analyzed using ANOVA,
  Tukey and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, with a
  significance level of p .05.
• Comparison between means of correct responses
  across ages. First hypothesis 6-years-old
  gt 5-years-old gt 4-years-old.
• Comparison between means of each type of error
  across ages. Second hypothesis
• N errors gt other errors
• 6-years-old N errors lt 5-years-old N errors lt
  4-years-old N errors.
• Comparison between means of correct responses
  across different levels of syntactic
  complexity. Third hypothesis
  sentences from Level A gt Level B gt Level C gt
  Level D.
• Analysis of isolated Singular and Plural
  measures. Fourth hypothesis Number
  information in isolated measures gt number
  information in sentence comprehension measures.

8
Results

• First analysis Childrens correct responses
  across ages.

9
Results

• Second analysis Childrens types of errors
  across ages.

10
Results
Third analysis Childrens correct responses
among sentence levels.
Four-year-old children performed similarly among
all sentences 5-year-old children improved their
performances in Level B and 6-year-old children
enhanced their performances from Levels A to B C
to D (visual priming effects) and A to D
(practice effect). These patterns indicate that
oldest childrens performances were not affected
by differences in sentences syntactic
structures, but seem to have been influenced by
cognitive strategies.
11
Results
Fourth analysis Childrens correct responses in
isolated Singular and Plural measures.
Children of all ages could comprehend singular
and plural information with more accuracy in
isolated measures than in sentence comprehension
tasks.
12
Discussion

• First hypothesis Confirmed. Childrens
  performance improved from 4 to 6 years of age,
  indicating that this Sentence Comprehension test
  was sensible to childrens development.
• Second hypothesis Partially confirmed. All
  subjects made more number (N) than other errors,
  but this kind of error did not significantly
  diminished from 4- to 6-years-old children.
• The higher occurrence of number errors in
  comparison to word order errors is consistent
  with the literature and indicates that the former
  is later acquired than the latter. It was not
  possible to observe a developmental pattern in
  this analysis since the mean of N-errors did not
  vary across ages.

13
Discussion

• Third hypothesis Not confirmed. Childrens
  performances did not differ in regard to
  variations in syntactic complexity employed in
  this study.
• Differently from predicted, childrens
  performances did not diminish among sentence
  levels, indicating that both emergent and
  consistent knowledge were not affected by
  grammatical complexity employed in this study.
  While 4-year-old children showed similar
  performances across sentence levels, the oldest
  group enhanced performance from levels A to B, C
  to D and A to D. This pattern suggests that
  oldest children took profit of learning
  strategies, which can have helped them to improve
  performance during the test (practice effect).
  They also seemed to use visual memory information
  (visual priming) to enhance performance in levels
  that shared the same visual stimuli.
• Fourth hypothesis Confirmed. Children could
  better process number morpheme information in
  isolated measures than in the Sentence
  Comprehension test.
• This finding suggests that differences in task
  demands influenced (either facilitating or
  impairing) childrens abilities to show the same
  linguistic knowledge.

14
Conclusions

• Sentence comprehension abilities improved from
  4- to 6-year-old children suggesting that, at 4
  years of age, children had more general
  linguistic processing difficulties than in all
  other ages. At 5 and 6 years of age, this
  difficulty remained especially in the
  comprehension of the number grammatical morpheme.
• Differences in task demands influenced (either
  facilitating or impairing) childrens language
  abilities.

15
Acknowledgements
The present study was granted by Fundação de
Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)
Brazil, process number 06/50660-3.
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