Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children with Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish

Autor/inn/en	Freudenthal, Daniel; Ramscar, Michael; Leonard, Laurence B.; Pine, Julian M.
Titel	Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children with Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish
Quelle	In: Cognitive Science, 45 (2021) 3, (29 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1551-6709
DOI	10.1111/cogs.12945
Schlagwörter	Verbs; Language Impairments; Symptoms (Individual Disorders); Associative Learning; Prediction; Cues; English; Spanish; Language Acquisition; Contrastive Linguistics; Morphology (Languages); Profiles; Linguistic Input; Morphemes; Grammar; Linguistic Theory; Children; Learning Problems + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Speech disorder; Speech disorders; Speech disabilities; Speech disability; Speech handicap; Speech handicaps; Speech impairment; Speech impairments; Language handicaps; Sprachbehinderung; Psychiatrische Symptomatik; Vorhersage; Stichwort; English language; Englisch; Spanisch; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Linguistics; Kontrastive Linguistik; Morphology; Morphologie; Charakterisierung; Profilanalyse; Sprachbildung; Morphem; Grammatik; Linguistische Theorie; Child; Kind; Kinder; Lernproblem
Abstract	Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third-person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro-drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01