Language Impairment in Less Skilled Comprehenders: The On-Line Processing of Anaphoric Pronouns in a Listening Situation |
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| Authors: | Hakima Megherbi Marie-France Ehrlich |
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| Institution: | (1) UTRPP EA 3413, Université Paris 13, France;(2) Université René Descartes, EPHE and CNRS, Paris, France;(3) Laboratoire Psychogenése et Psychopathologie (EA3413), Université Paris 13, UFR des Lettres et des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, 99 avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France |
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| Abstract: | The purpose of this experiment, conducted with second-grade children (mean age: 7;8), was to examine the hypothesis that less
skilled comprehenders in a reading situation suffer an impairment in spoken language comprehension and, more specifically,
in the on-line processing of anaphoric pronouns. Skilled and less skilled comprehenders performed a cross-modal naming task
investigating the effects of pronoun gender and pragmatic inference from the verb on the integration of two successive sentences.
Results revealed different patterns of effects in the two groups. The skilled comprehenders integrated on-line sentences by
relying on pronoun gender and verb meaning. Pronoun gender appeared to exert a dominant influence relative to verb bias. In
the less skilled comprehenders, on-line integration was not systematic, being dependent on the meaning of the verb and the
proximity of the referent. Complementary analyses revealed similar patterns of effects among less skilled comprehenders, whether
they were good decoders or poor decoders. These results show that less skilled comprehenders are developmentally delayed compared
with their skilled peers, and extend the language impairment hypothesis to cover discourse-level processes. |
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| Keywords: | Anaphoric pronouns in children Language impairment Reading comprehension |
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