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Gopnik - Language deficits Review Language deficits and genetic factors M. Gopnik ldUNN effortlessly. theN are some children who find __. . . a difficult and arduous task. This group of subjects resembhts a 'ment and has the potential to provide us with insights into the nature of biolOgical basis of language. The data show that this disorder is associated with In genetic fadors that can lead to neurological abnormalities. Our studies of the istic details of language impairment in English, French, Greek and Japanese have to conclude that affeded individuals cannot construd normal representations ....ex words nor can they construd the rules which should operate on these s. These data are inconsistent with any explanation in terms of auditory processing, Therefore. we must conclude that a genetic disorder can abflltY to builcl a notn'UlIl grammar. Amost all children acquire language quickly and easily, much as rhey learn to walk uptight. They may stumble at neurological anomalies come from? Gallagher and Watkin have used new ultra-sound techniques to image brain de- the very beginning, but very soon they are off on their own, doing it expertly without any specific instruction. The tact that grammars are so complex and children acquire them so velopment in the last trimester of fetal development. They looked at one fetus from a family with a history oflanguage easily led Chomsky to conjecture that children must come equipped with an innate system that tells them how to build a grammar. Although most children acquire the rules of their language without any conscious effort, there are a few children who do not acquire language easily':", Many of these language-impaired individuals have problems with particular parts of language even when they are adults. For instance, they cannot reliably produce the past tense of a verb, something that four-year-olds can do without a problem. For example, when asked to complete the following sentences: 'Every day he walks eight miles. Yesterday he .... ' or 'He always friks outside. As usual, yesterday he .... ' they problems and compared it with three fetuses from families without a history of language disorder. The data produced suggested that fetuses from families with language impairment have a different pattern of brain development in the last trimester of gestation compared with fetuses from families not at risk for language impairment". This all points to certain genetic factors affecting neurological development which in turn affects the ability to acquire language. Explanations There is no doubt that a disorder affecting language development exists. There is a large clinical population of would not be able to answer. children that clearly find language difficult although they have normal auditory acuity, non-verbal and psycho-social skills. It is also true that some, but not all, of these children Genetics and neurology Interestingly, evidence indicates that this disorder might be do have other problems; these range from dyslexia to problems with spatial rotation, depression and an inability to related to genetic factors and could also be associated with certain neurological anomalies. Epidemiological studies have shown that if one member of a family has this language problem it is likely that another membet of the family will also have the same problem"!". Additionally, studies com- identify which finger is being touched when their hands are hidden from view. However, none of these other deficits reliably occurs with the language disorder and there are many individuals that have one of these other problems without paring identical rwins with fraternal rwins show that if one identical rwin has this language disorder the likelihood of the other rwin also having the problem is about 85%; if the rwins are fraternal the likelihood of them both having the disorder drops to 45% (Refs 9,11). Magnetic resonance imaging studies of the brains of individuals with a family history of rhis language disorder have shown that it is associated with neurological anomalies" ". Where do these having any language disorder. The question is whether the language problems that we see in these individuals come from a separate and special 'language faculty' that is out of order or whether some more general cognitive or perceptual processing system is not functioning and the purported 'language' problems are merely a result of a breakdown in a much more general system. In 1990 I reported, in Nature, on a family in England in which half of the members had particular difficulcies Copyright © 1997, Elsevier Science Ltd. All riqhts reserved. 1364-6613/97/$17.00 Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Vol PII: S1364-6613(97)01005-X 1, No.1, April 1997 M. Gopnikis in the Department of Linguistics, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke St West, Montreal, Cansd«; H3A IG5. tel: +'1 5143983155 fax: +1 5143987088 o Gopnik - Language deficits Table 1. Ability to produce tense marking (% correct) English (England) English Impaired 38.3 52.3 Controls 91.7 93.5 % correct French (Canada) Japanese Greek 46,7 48.1 20.0 96.4 97.9 87.1 (Canada) Subjects were given items like: Everyday I walk to school. Just like everyday, yesterday I. ... This task requires the subject to recognize that the temporal context specified in the second sentence requires a particular verb form. with certain aspects of English II,. Since then we have studied dozens of language-impaired families. We have sent native speakers to Greece to gather the data from language-impaired Greek speakers and to Japan to gather the Japanese data. In Canada we have tested both English speakers and French Japanese and Greek subjects and they all show the same pattern of impairment, The language-impaired subjects are speakers. In some extended families one branch are native speakers of English and another branch are native speakers generally good at the same language tasks, such as recognizing that an item like 'zashed' is not a word in English, and of French. The linguistic data are remarkably convergent across these linguistically diverse populations (J. Dalalakis, PhD Thesis, McGill University, Canada. 1996; P. Royle, MA Thesis. McGill University, Canada, 1996; H. Goad and C. Rebellari. unpublished observations)"!" ,... These data bad at the same tasks, such as producing tense-marking. It has been suggested that if these subjects have problems with processing sound they might miss the small sounds at the end of verbs (e.g. in English I-dl) that mark the past have led us to conclude that language-impaired subjects do not construct the same sorts of complex representations for words as their unaffected relatives and, therefore, they can- have problems with tense we should say they have problems with hearing or pronouncing the final I-dl and that, in turn, causes them to make errors in tense-marking. If that were not use the grammatical rules that operate on these complex representations. Moreover, these linguistic problems often cluster in families. I have often been misinterpreted as true, it would show that their problem was not with tense at all, but rnerelv with perceiving or articulating the sound claiming that a separate gene exists for grammar - I do not. The data, however, do indicate that particular properties of language can be impaired and that this impairment is associated with genetic factors that, in turn. have consequences tense":". If this were the case, instead of saying that they that encodes tense. But their problem with tense is not restricted to English; the subjects with language problems have difficulties with tense in all the populations we have looked at (see Table 1). What is particularly interesting is that the way tense is for neurological development. Not everybody agrees with our hypothesis that the dif- encoded in these other languages is quite different from English. For example, Greek has many more different forms ficulties that these subjects have with language are a direct result of the problems that they have with building linguistic representations and rules. There are three major kinds of objections raised by those who think that: (1) these subjects of the verb than any of the other languages (about 60 for regular verbs as compared with about four in English). Therefore, there are many more ways to get the tense wrong in Greek than there are in English, and the Greek data reflect do have a problem with building grammars but we are mistaken about what part of the grammar is broken I " ; (2) the this fact. In French the final syllable is stressed, so that the tense ending is easy to hear. In Japanese it is even more ob- crucial problem lies with auditory or articulatory processing vious because certain tenses are marked by multisyllabic inflections. I know, from personal experience, that some of and the apparent problems with language are really an indirect result of these non-linguistic processing difficulties'" 12'; and (3) the problem with language is a reflection of a more general problem in the cognitive system. Each of these other explanations makes specific predictions about what precisely these inflections are extremely easy to hear, even for a nonspeaker of Japanese. 'X'hen I was in Japan I watched the news on TV and the one recurring word that I heard was 'rnashira. The next day I asked my host what 'rnashira' should go wrong with language and what else should be wrong with these subjects. but unfortunately the cross-linguistic meant. He looked confused and then laughed; 'rnashira', it rums alit, is the polite past-tense inflection (it was rather data are not consistent with these alternative models. like asking what the word 'ing' means in English). So the problems with tense that Japanese language-impaired subjects have cannot be caused by an auditory processing problem. This is not true even in English because the English subjects also get irregular verbs, like go/went, wrong, and they make the same kinds of mistakes in tense no matter how they are tested: in writing, in reading, in grammatical judgements and in grammatical ratings 2 ] - .''' . The data To make our argument convincing we have to show that this disorder affects those aspects of language that reflect impaired rules and representations. We also have to show that these linguistic problems are not related to the peculiar shape of any particular language, but occur across languages that have very different properties. In addition. we must demonstrate that the differences that are observed between impaired and unimpaired subjects, when they are consciously o processing language, also show up when they are unconsciously processing the same sorts of items. To date, we have extensive data from English, French, Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Vol 1, No 1, April It is true that they sometimes produce the past tense or plural forms in spontaneous speech. This has led some researchers to postulate that they have the rule for forming 1997 Gopnik - Language deficits the past tense but they just do not know exactly when rhev have to use it. However, the fact that they sometimes use the word 'walked' does not show that they represent it in the same way as the normal grammar does: that is, the stem 'walk' plus the inflection for past tense '-ed'. We have investigated this in detail and several different and independent sources of evidence show that the language-impaired subjects treat words, even inflected words, as whole unanalyzed chunks. For them the word 'walked' is simply a single word 'These are ... ' 'This is a wug' that means 'to move in the past', AliI can do here is give a small selection from our results. One simple test to see whether they have a productive rule for making inflected forms is to give them a novel word, that they could never have heard before, and provide a context in which it has to undergo some grammatical rule (see Fig, I), We tried this out for several grammarical forms in all of our populations. In every single rest the impaired subjects were significantly worse than the controls (see Table 2). These data show clearly and convincingly that the language-impaired subjects are significantly worse than unimpaired subjects for every grammatical task and for every language population. However, if they really do not have a 'Na enas pondik6s.' (Here is a mouse) 'Na enas anthropos pu ... ' (Here is a man who becomes a mouse. We call him ... ) Fig. 1 For production of novel forms. make it 'sasss' with a prolonged l-si: given \rug' they produce 'wug-s' instead of the normal form 'wugz': given 'rob' they productive rule then you might wonder, not how they get it produce 'rob-ES' with the final sound pronounced as if they wrong sometimes, but how they ever get any right. A very careful phonetic analysis of the forms that are counted as were naming the letter they had been taught to add. Some- correct English plurals and past tenses in Table 1 shows that many of the seemingly correct forms that are produced by the language-impaired subjects are not strictly correct at ail":". The forms that the language-impaired subjects are producing are very different from the rule-governed forms produced by the controls. For example, the impaired subjects seem to know that there has to be an I-s/-like sound at the end of a word when it refers to more than one object (not surprising, since most of them have spent many hours in speech therapy where they have been explicitly taught to 'add an I-sl when there is more than one'). So when they are given the novel word 'sas' they simply add an I-sl sound and times it appears that they search their mental lexicon ro find the closest real sounding word that ends with a sibilant I-s/-like sound, whether or not this sound actually encodes plurality. For example, when given the word 'brorn' they produce the word 'bronze' which has a slightlv different nasal sound, but has the I-s/-like sound that they are searching for. When you control for these kinds of errors their success rate drops to lOO;(l. This is not an impressive success rate, especially as the 'add an I-sl' strategy will, in some cases, produce a form that sounds just like the expected form even though it is produced via a different route. What this shows is that if you do not have the normal route available to acquire language, you can find some orher way to solve the problem. It will not do it as quickly Table 2. Ability to mark novel words grammatically (% correct) Grammar Language Controls Impaired Past tense English (in England) English (in Canada) Greek French Japanese 95.4 93.5 87.1 92.6 89.1 38.0 52.3 20.0 33.3 37.0 Plurals English (in England) English (in Canada) Greek 95.7 99.2 79.8 57.0 58.3 42.1 Comparatives English (in England) 74 21 Compounds Japanese Greek 80.5 93.6 20.2 12.8 Greek 83.9 40.2 Diminutives ----._-- --------_.- In each of these tests the subjects were given a context which required that a grammatical rule be applied to a novel word: This pencil is weff. This pencil is even .. Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Vol 1. No 1, April 1997 o Gopnik - Language deficits or as well, but it will make a start. All of these cross-linguistic data from novel forms tell the same story: the languageimpaired subjects do not know how to use the resources of their language to automatically produce new forms. Another interesting example involves the production of compounds and diminutives in Greek. To produce these forms you must be able to separate the root from the inflection. Language-impaired Greek subjects cannot do this; they do not recognize that Greek words have complex internal structures" (J. Dalalakis, Thesis, McGill University, Canada, 1996). impairments. There is no reliable correlation between any specific cognitive problem and the language deficit. In addition, nobody has shown how the cognitive problems which a few of them do have. such as low-performance IQ or problems with spatial rotation, could directly result in a problem with inflecting novel words. It is much more likely that the genetic disorder causes abnormal neurological development and these neurological anomalies, in turn, can affect different cognitive and perceptual processes. If this is true, then the linguistic problems may co-occur with any number of other deficits without being directly caused by any of them. So far, all of the tests considered have required the subjects to process language consciously. If these impaired subjects Conclusion do have complex internal representations of words and pro- What do we know? Some people are born with the inabiliry ductive rules that operate on these representations, but do not to acquire some of the specific grammatical aspects of their have any way of consciously manipulating the knowledge that native language and this inability, from all indications, is they have, then our conclusions could be wrong. If this were associated with one or more genetic factors which control true, the inflected forms that they produce in spontaneous neurological development. It looks as ifDatwin was right again speech might be produced by the correct productive rule, when he said: 'man has an instinctive tendency to speak.':" but they would not have the resources ro manipulate these rules consciously. There are a lot of data showing that people who have brain injuries often still have implicit knowledge that they have no way of explicitly accessing. To test whether References 1 Van der lely. H. and Harris, M. (1990) Comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language impaired children 1. Speech Lang. this could be the case with the language-impaired subjects we developed tests in which the subjects were consciously Dis. 55,101-117 2 Bishop, D.v.M. (1992) The underlying nature of specific language Impairment J. Child Psycho/. Psychiatry 33. 3-66 doing one task while we were testing another. In these tests, the subjects think that they are merely judging whether a 3 Clahsen, H. (1992) linguistic perspectives on specific language impairment Theorie des Lexikons, Arbeitspapier 37, Heinrich Heine word on the computer screen is a real word in their language or not - a task that they are good at. What we are really test- Universitat 4 leonard, l. (1994) Some problems facing accounts of morphological ing is whether they process linguistically complex words, like deficits in children with specific language impairment, in Specific past forms or diminutives, differently from simple forms. The Language Impairments in Children (Watkins. R.v. and Rice, M.l., eds), on-line processing data from English, French and Greek show that the impaired subjects actually do unconsciously Paul H. Brookes 5 Rice, M.l. (1994) Grammatical categories of children with specific language impairments, in Specific Language Impairments in Children process words differently from their unimpaired relatives":". The controls take longer to process grammatically complex (Watkins, R.v. and Rice, M.l.. eds), pp. 69-90, Paul H. Brookes 6 Gopnik, or 'zash': the language-impaired subjeers process both simple 7 Pembrey, M. (1992) Genetics and language disorders, in Specific Speech and Language Disorders in Children (Fletcher, P. and Hall, D., and complex words at the same rate. Whether you look at eds), Singular Publishing Group their off-line performance or their on-line performance they 8 Tomblin, J.B. and Buckwalter, P.R.(1994) Studies of genetics of specific seem ro be oblivious to the fact that words can be made up language impairment, in Specific Language Impairments in Children (Watkins, R.V. and Rice, M.l., eds), pp. 17-34, Paul H. Brookes of sub-parts and that these sub-parts can be operated on by 9 Tomblin, B. Epidemiology of specific language impairment, in The rules at a higher level. Inheritance and Innateness of Grammars (Gopnik, M., ed.), Oxford No single test or population can tell the whole story. We continue to try out new tests on new populations and they University Press (in press) 10 Palmour, keep telling us the same story. The language-impaired subjects have a very specific problem: they cannot build complex (We know that some of our subjects might also have prob- data in great detail we are convinced that their problem can- alhough a few of these subjects do have other cognitive difficulties, most of them do not (there is even a language-impaired specific linguistic impairment language impairment: evidence from a twin study Dev. Med. Child 12 Plante, E. (1991) MRI findings in the parent and siblings of specifically language-impaired boys Brain Lang. 41, 67--80 13 Plante, E. et al. (1991) MRI findings in boys with specific language impairment Brain Lang. 41, 52-66 14 Kabani, N. et ai. Neuroanatomical correlates of familial language impairment: a preliminary report 1. Neurolinguistics (in press) 15 Gallagher, T. and Watkin. K. 3D ultrasonic fetal neuroimaging and not be explained away by any articulatory or auditory problem"2'.'''.\(). It also seems unlikely that this linguistic impairment is caused by some more general cognitive problem: of NeuroJ. 37, 56-71 Even when we just look at word formation it certainly looks as if this is specifically a linguistic deficit. After studying the studies 11 Bishop, D.V., North, T. and Donlan, C. (1995) Genetic basis of specific lems with other aspects of language, like phonology and syntax, and that is an interesting story for another tirne.) R. Genetic 1. Neurolinguistics (in press) representations for words or the rules that operate on them. o M. et al. (1996) Genetic language impairment: unruly grammars Proc. Br. Acad. B8, 223-249 words like 'walked' or 'zashed' than simple words like 'walk' familial language disorders: in utero brain development 1. Neuro- finguistics (in press) 16 Gopnik, M. (1990) Feature-blind grammar and dysphagia Nature 344, 715 17 Gopnik, M. and Crago, M. (1991) Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder Cognition 39, 1-50 subject who is a rocket scientist). And many people with cog- 18 Fukuda, S. (1994) lexical representation of Japanese complex verbs: a nitive impairments do not have any corresponding language theoretical model and implication from dysphasic children, in McGill Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Vol 1, No.1, April 1997 , Gopnlk - Language deficits Working Papers in Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10, 194-205 19 Fukuda, S.E. and Fukuda, S. (1994) Developmental language impairment: the status of features language impairment in Japanese: a linguistic investigation, in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10, 150-177 underlying grammar Language Acquisition 2, 151-179 26 Gopnik, M. (1994) Impairments of tense in a familial language disorder j 20 Goad, H. and Rebellati, C. (1994) Pluralization in specific language in the Neurotiriquistics 8, 109-133 27 Kehayia, E. (1994) Whole-word access of demonposition in word impairment: affixation or compounding? in McGill Working Papers in recognition in familial language impairment: a psycholinguistic study, Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10,24-40 in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10, 123-128 21 Gopnik, M. and Goad, H. What underlies inflectional errors in SLI' 1. Neurolinquistics (in press) 28 Kehayia, E. Lexical access and representation in mdividuats with developmental 22 Paradis, M. and Gopnik, M. Compensatory strategies in genetic Review a cross-linguistic study 1. language impairments Neurotiriquistics (in press) 29 Gopnik, M. (1994) The articulary hypothesis: production of final dysphasia: declarative memory 1. Neurotiriqutsrics (in press) 23 Tallal, P., Sainburg, R.L. and Jernigan, T. (1991) The neuropathology of developmental dysphasia: behavioral, morphological and physiological evidence for a pervasive temporal processing disorder Reading and alveolars in monomorphemic words, in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10, 129-134 30 Gopnik, M. (1994) The perceptual processing hypothesis revisited, in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Matthews, J., ed.), 10, 135-141 Writing: an Interdisciplinary lournal 3, 363-377 24 Fletcher, P. (1990) Untitled scientific correspondence Nature 346, 226 25 Leonard, L, etal. (1992) Morphological deficits in children with specific 31 Darwin, C.R. (1874) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed.) Hurst and Company Intentionality and word learning Paul Bloom I._.. ... think about . . actions of others in terms of mental states - beliefs, i.I_I't;icms and intentions. This 'theory ofimind' plays a central role in how "am the meanings of certain words. First, it underlies how they determine the of a novel word. When children hear a new objed nal'rM! (e.g. 'Look at the do not use spatio-temporal contiguity to determine what the word "$CdllJes; instead they focus on cues to the referential intention of the speaker, such as «iiredion of gaze. Second, an understanding of purpose and design is sometimes *'--SfH'Y to enable the child to understand the entities and adions that nouns and _ms r.er to. This is particularly relevant for nouns that refer to collections of objects .... as tfamily' and 'game', and for verbs that refer to adions defined in terms of an . .Is. such as 'give' and 'make'. Finally, intentional considerations partially aDele ....raliation of names for artifad categories. such as 'chair' and 'clock', 'IliIJI1chcan"'r to entities of highly dissimilar appearance. Humans intuitively view other members of the species as possessing beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions, and we use this 'theory of mind' to predict and explain their actions, Even 12-month-old babies have sufficient theory of mind to generate expectations about how an agent should word describes by interring the adult's referential intention, Furthermore, some words refer to entities we construe as distinct individuals, in part because of our appreciation of social and psychological factors, and others correspond to act based on its previous goal-directed behavior. The abiiiry to think of the actions of others in mentalistic terms categories that are generalized on the basis of these factors. These claims are perhaps obvious enough for the acquisition of abstract nouns and verbs such as 'opinion' and bears all the hallmarks of a domain-specific cognitive ability: (1) it is clearly of adaptive benefit, (2) it emerges spontaneously at an early age, (3) it can be specifically impaired in the case of autism, and (4) it is present, in an attenuated 'guessing', but there is evidence that they apply equally to words that denote more concrete objects and actions, such as 'chair' and 'open', the types of nouns and verbs found in the speech of rwo-year-olds. form, in other primates'. What role does theory of mind play in language acquisition? I will review evidence that the ability to infer the in- There is more to word learning than theory of mind, of course, and hence the hypothesis proposed here is intended to supplement theories that focus on the role of conceptual tentions of others is a central part of word learning. When constraints and linguistic cues':": it is not an alternative to an adult uses a new word, the child determines what the them, For reasons discussed below, however, it is incompatible Copyright © 1997, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1364-6613/97/$17.00 Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Vol PII: 51364-6613(97)01006-1 1, No.1, April 1997 P. Bloom is in the Department of Psychology, University of Arizonil, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. tel: • I 520 621 1581 1ax:.1 520621 9306 e-mail: b1oom@u,arizona.edu o Review Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment Specific language impairment: a deficit in grammar or processing? Marc F. Joanisse and Mark S. Seidenberg Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is observed in children who fail to acquire ageappropriate language skills but otherwise appear to be developing normally. There are two main hypotheses about the nature of these impairments. One assumes that they reflect impairments in the child’s innate knowledge of grammar. The other is that they derive from information-processing deficits that interfere with several aspects of language learning. There is considerable evidence that SLI is associated with impaired speech processing; however, the link between this deficit and the kinds of grammatical impairments observed in these children has been unclear. We suggest that the link is provided by phonology, a speech-based code that plays important roles in learning linguistic generalizations and in working memory. S M.F. Joanisse and M.S. Seidenberg are at the Neuroscience Program, University of Southern California, USC Neuroscience HNB18, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520, USA. tel: +1 213 740 9174 fax: +1 213 740 5687 e-mail: marcj@gizmo. usc.edu 240 pecific Language Impairment is the diagnostic category for children who fail to develop age-appropriate language despite being apparently normal in other respects. By definition, these children are thought to have no obvious hearing, cognitive, or neurological deficits, yet they learn to talk relatively late. When they do begin to talk they produce fewer utterances than expected for their age and intelligence; and they exhibit deficits in several aspects of language including phonology, morphology and syntax (see Box 1). The fact that these children are also impaired in comprehending language suggests that their problem is not merely a peripheral one related to the production of speech. SLI has recently attracted considerable attention as a source of evidence about the biological and genetic bases of grammar. The central problem in the study of language acquisition is to explain how a child can acquire language in a relatively short period of time, given the complexity of language and the nature of the input to which children are exposed1–4. The standard view, derived from the work of Chomsky, is that the input to the child is impoverished, and that languages are only learnable because knowledge of grammatical structure – ‘universal grammar’ – is innate. Some researchers working within this framework have taken SLI as evidence that specific components of this innate grammatical capacity can be damaged. For example, the fact that the children’s use of past tense morphology is impaired is attributed to a deficit in the morphological component of grammar5. The fact that at least some forms of SLI have a heritable component has prompted further speculation that components of grammar may have specific genetic encodings5–7. Pinker, for example, has suggested that ‘the syndrome shows that there must be some pattern of genetically guided events in the development in the brain…that is specialized for the wiring in of linguistic computation’ (Ref. 5, p. 324). This view of SLI was summarized previously by Gopnik7. That people are born knowing ‘universal grammar’ and that language necessarily involves rules are themselves controversial claims8–10 and so it is not surprising that attempts Copyright © 1998, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1364-6613/98/$19.00 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1998 Box 1. Elements of language affected in SLI Children with SLI are usually impaired in using several aspects of language, including some or all of the following: Phonology: refers to the organization of speech sounds into segments. Affected children have difficulty producing words with complex clusters of consonants (like spectacle), or analysing the phonological structure of a word (such as saying what sound follows the /p/ in split). Morphology: refers to the structure of words and mechanisms for creating related words such as affixing and compounding. English-speaking children with SLI are often impaired at tasks involving the generation of past tenses or plurals, particularly for novel words such as wug and blick. Syntax: refers to the structure of sentences. Affected children have difficulty analysing sentences with complex syntactic structures, such as datives (Sally showed Henry to Bill) and passives (Frank was hit by Bob). PII: S1364-6613(98)01186-3 Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment Review Box 2. Possible language impairment subtypes Clinical Language Subtypes proposed by Rapin and Allena, as reported in Bishopb. Many of these subtypes are likely to be excluded from studies of SLI. Verbal auditory agnosia (‘word deafness’): severe comprehension deficit, in which affected child is poor at understanding spoken language. Language production is poor. Verbal dyspraxia: deficit in using speech articulators. Language production is poor, though comprehension is relatively normal. Phonological programming syndrome: deficit in producing speech sounds, though oral-motor ability is normal. Comprehension is relatively normal. Phonological–syntactic deficit: poor phonological and syntactic abilities. Both production and comprehension are impaired. Lexical–syntactic deficit syndrome: word-finding difficulties, to explain SLI in these terms have also generated considerable debate. (See two excellent recently published overviews of SLI research11,12 for additional discussion of many of the issues discussed here.) We will argue in this review that the main question about SLI is whether the deficit is, in fact, limited to grammar. An alternative view is that these impairments are sequelae of information processing deficits that broadly interfere with language learning. In particular, there is good evidence that SLI is associated with impairments in the processing of speech; that these impairments affect the development of phonological representations; and that degraded phonological representations are the proximal cause of deviant acquisition of morphology and syntax, by virtue of their roles in learning and working memory. This view differs from how grammarians interpret SLI, but is consistent with an older clinical tradition in which developmental language impairments have been recognized as dysphasias that are often accompanied by deficits in perception and learning13,14. Varieties of childhood language impairment One issue that must be confronted at the outset is the considerable ambiguity about SLI as a diagnostic category. It is clear that language is a complex system, the acquisition and use of which are highly dependent on various aspects of perception, cognition, learning and motor performance. It is therefore not surprising that language development can be impaired in a variety of ways. Box 2 provides a typology of developmental language impairments proposed by Rapin and Allen15. It is unlikely that all of these patterns of impairment have a common cause and the extent to which the deficits are limited to language is unclear. Terms such as ‘specific language impairment’, ‘developmental language impairment’ and ‘developmental dysphasia’ are applied to children whose behavioral profiles and etiologies vary considerably. In this respect, these categories are like the term ‘dyslexia’, which is broadly applied to children with reading impairments but differentiates into subtypes associated with different behavioral patterns and etiologies16. Like language impairment, dyslexia often co-occurs with (and may be caused by) other cognitive and perceptual deficits. As Rapin accompanied with difficulty using sentences in connected speech. Comprehension of abstract meanings is poor. Similar to the popular definition of SLI. Semantic–pragmatic deficit syndrome: production and comprehension of grammar is normal, but the ability to understand and produce meaningful utterances is impaired. References a Rapin, I. and Allen, D. (1987) Developmental dysphasia and autism in pre-school children: characteristics and subtypes, in Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Specific Speech and Language Disorders in Children, Association of All Speech Impaired Children b Bishop, D.V.M. (1997) Uncommon Understanding: Development and Disorders of Language Comprehension in Children, Psychology Press and Allen’s taxonomy suggests, there is a subtype of language impairment in which deficits in phonology and syntax co-occur; they are the children typically labeled ‘SLI’ and the focus of this article. Grammatical impairments in SLI Grammatical accounts of SLI have focused on deficits in morphology and syntax. Children with SLI have difficulty producing and comprehending morphologically complex words, such as the past tense and plural inflections in English (e.g. baked, books). They understand the concepts of pastness and plurality, but their ability to express these concepts using grammatical morphemes is impaired. This phenomenon is not limited to English; SLI speakers of other languages exhibit impairments in using other aspects of morphology such as case marking in Hebrew17, grammatical aspect in Japanese18 and compound words in Greek19. A grammatical account of this deficit20 holds that SLI children are missing the abstract grammatical principle of inflection, which is necessary for determining linguistic relationships such as subject-verb agreement and grammatical case assignment. As a result, these children fail to proceed beyond an early ‘optional infinitive’ stage in acquisition, during which the application of inflectional rules is not obligatory. On this view, their errors follow from a lack of knowledge that morphological marking is obligatory. A different account of this morphological deficit was proposed by Pinker and Gopnik, who assert that it derives from an inability to learn inflectional rules5–7,21. Because they lack the capacity to formulate rules, SLI children can only learn morphological marking through rote learning of individual inflected words. This account is consistent with the observation that children with SLI produce some correctly-inflected forms (such as baked) as well as irregular forms (such as took) but perform poorly when asked to generate inflected forms for novel words (such as wug)6. On this account, SLI provides evidence that language involves rules, that this rule-forming capacity can be congenitally impaired, and that the deficit may be genetically transmitted. Syntactic impairments have also been demonstrated in SLI. These include difficulties with complex structures such Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1998 241 Review Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment Box 3. Other deficits in SLI SLI children can also exhibit impairments of non-linguistic abilities, although the relationship of these deficits to their impaired language is unclear. They could be a cause or consequence of the language deficit, or simply an unrelated co-occurrence. Oral-motor control (dyspraxia): while diagnoses of SLI preclude individuals with gross motor deficits (dysarthria), difficulties in planning and executing complex oral-motor programs appear to be significantly impaired in a handful of casesa,b. Speech perception: the ability to discriminate and categorize speech sounds is diminished (e.g. Ref. c; see also Fig. 1). Working memory: children with SLI have shorter working memory spans, in both speech and non-speech modalitiesd–f. Analogical reasoning: the ability to reason through analogy is impaired, even in tasks for which language plays a minimal roleg–i. Visual imagery: children with SLI perform worse than controls in tasks such as the mental rotation of imagesi. b Vargha-Khadem, F. et al. (1995) Praxic and non-verbal cognitive deficits in a large family with a genetically transmitted speech and language disorder Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 92, 930–933 c Elliott, L.L., Hammer, M.A. and Scholl, M.E. (1990) Fine-grained auditory discrimination in normal children and children with language-learning problems J. Speech Hear. Res. 32, 112–119 d Gathercole, S.E. and Baddeley, A.D. (1990) Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a causal connection? J. Mem. Lang. 29(3), 336–360 e Kirchner, D. and Klatzky, R. (1985) Verbal rehearsal and memory in language-disordered children J. Speech Hear. Res. 28, 556–564 f Tallal, P. et al. (1981) A re-examination of some non-verbal perceptual abilities of language-impaired and normal children as a function of age and sensory modality J. Speech Hear. Res. 24, 351–357 g Nelson, L., Kamhi, A. and Apel, A. (1987) Cognitive strengths and weaknesses in language-impaired children: one more look J. Speech Hear. Disord. 52, 36–43 h Ellis-Weismer, S. (1985) Constructive comprehension abilities exhibited by language-disordered children J. Speech Hear. Disord. 28, 175–184 i Johnston, References a Vargha-Khadem, F. and Passingham, R.E. as dative/double-object alternations (‘Bill showed the dog to the cat’ versus ‘Bill showed the dog the cat’) and reversible passives (‘the ship sank the submarine’ versus ‘the ship was sunk by the submarine’)22. A study by van der Lely and Stollwerck23 identified deficits in the ability to use syntactic principles governing anaphoric reference (e.g. ‘Bill says that Bobby is watching himself’ versus ‘Bill says that Bobby is watching him’). In the first sentence, ‘himself’ can only refer to Bobby, and not Bill; in the second sentence, ‘him’ cannot refer to Bobby, though it can optionally refer to Bill. Generative theory suggests that there is a universal set of binding principles governing such constructions24. Van der Lely and Stollwerck suggested that this aspect of grammar was affected in their subjects. Results of this kind suggest that the deficits of children with SLI are not limited to morphology and may include several aspects of sentence grammar. These accounts share the idea that SLI involves impaired grammar. However, there is disagreement among them concerning the nature of the impairment, specifically the incidence of different types of grammatical deficits, their relative frequencies and how often they co-occur, and whether other aspects of language are also affected. SLI is said to involve ‘selective’ impairments to specific components of grammar, but few studies have looked equally carefully at a broad range of linguistic and non-linguistic abilities in the same subjects. Perceptual deficits in SLI It is clear that SLI children’s behavioral impairments extend well beyond grammar (see Box 3). In particular, there is considerable evidence that they have subtle impairments in speech perception. In several studies, they performed poorly on tasks that require discriminating phonological features such as consonant voicing (the difference between ba and pa) and place of articulation (ba versus ga)25, failing to show Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, and Ellis-Weismer, S. (1983) Mental-rotation 397–403 correspondence Nature 346, 226 242 J. abilities in language-disordered children J. Speech Hear. Res. 26, (1990) Scientific the normal categorical perception effects associated with such stimuli (Fig. 1). Whereas the grammar approach treats this deficit as unrelated to the children’s linguistic impairments, the alternative account holds that it is their proximal cause: SLI children learn language deviantly because they misperceive speech. The basis for this speech processing deficit is unclear. Tallal has proposed that the impairment involves the processing of rapid, sequential information26,28. Spoken language involves perceiving a complex, rapidly changing, fastfading auditory signal, and thus an impaired capacity to resolve aspects of this signal would greatly interfere with learning language. Tallal’s theory predicts selective impairments in perceiving speech sounds that rely on short (less than 50 ms), transient acoustic cues such as the voicing of stop consonants (e.g. the difference between do and to). It also predicts that speech sounds that are discriminated by longer acoustic cues (longer than 100 ms) such as vowels and fricatives (e.g. the initial sounds in sue and shoe) should be unimpaired. Tallal’s studies have also identified impairments in perceiving rapid stimuli in the visual and tactile modalities in these children, suggesting that the deficit is not speech-specific. In addition, this work has suggested that the language abilities of children with SLI can be improved by adaptively training them to discriminate rapid and sequential auditory signals, including speech and non-speech sounds28. Tallal’s research has generated considerable interest but it has also raised many methodological and theoretical questions and it continues to be the focus of intensive investigation. There is little consensus as to the exact characterization of this perceptual deficit, and there may be considerable variability within the SLI population with regard to it (see Ref. 11, Chapter 3 for a review). In addition, processing deficits similar to those described by Tallal have July 1998 Review Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment How common are perceptual deficits in SLI? Some researchers have failed to observe abnormal speech perception in children with SLI, raising further questions about its relevance to their language impairments. Such null results need to be interpreted cautiously, however. A serious concern is whether the tasks that yielded null results provided adequate tests of the children’s perceptual capacities. For example, Gopnik21 investigated only subjects’ abilities to discriminate and repeat minimal pairs of words (e.g. bat and bad); this task does not capture much of the complexity of perceiving continuous speech and may have been simple enough for even perceptually impaired children to perform. There is an extensive literature on speech perception impairments in SLI using tasks that provide sensitive measures of subtle aspects of auditory processing25,26,29–31. Some studies using such measures have revealed apparently normal auditory perception in some children with SLI but again the results must be interpreted cautiously. For example, Bernstein and Stark31 examined language-impaired children who had demonstrated abnormal auditory perception at a younger age, and found that for some of these children this impairment had resolved even though their language deficits persisted. The authors suggested that a language deficit could result from a perceptual deficit occurring at a critical point in language development, even though it would not necessarily be present at a later stage in development. Phonological deficits and SLI Granting that at least some language-impaired children have abnormal speech perception, how can these deficits be related to their impaired language? We propose that the link between the two is provided by phonology. The child must learn the phonological inventory and other phonological regularities of the language to which he/she is exposed. Impaired perception of speech interferes with the development of phonological representations, which in turn affects other aspects of grammatical development17. Consistent with this account, many language-impaired children, particularly those who also manifest syntactic difficulties15, exhibit abnormal phonology as revealed by poor repetition of nonsense words32, misarticulating or deleting phonemes from words33, difficulty in identifying words with similar 100 90 80 ‘t’ identifications (%) been observed in children whose language is not impaired; Krauss et al.28 showed that both a group of children with SLI and a group of learning-impaired children with no language difficulties had aberrant evoked response potentials (ERPs), recorded from scalp electrodes, consistent with a deficit in perceiving rapid sensory information. Similarly, Ludlow et al.29 observed a deficit in perceiving rapid auditory information in both children with SLI and hyperactive children who had no observable language impairment. Thus, if this deficit causes SLI, it is unclear why some children who have it do not develop impaired language. Another challenge for the ‘timing’ hypothesis is evidence that SLI children are also impaired in discriminating speech sounds that are not differentiated by rapidly changing acoustic cues, such as vowels and fricatives30. This suggests that they have problems perceiving acoustic differences between sounds rather than processing short rapid stimuli. 70 60 50 40 30 SLI 20 Controls 10 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 VOT (ms) Fig. 1 Normal and abnormal speech categorization. In this task, synthetic speech stimuli form a ‘voice onset time’ (VOT) continuum from /d/ to /t/ because of variation in the lag between the consonant’s release and the onset of the following vowel. In normally-developing children and adults, the perception of these items is sharply categorical, with a steep slope at the boundary. Children with SLI typically have weak or distorted categorical perception, characterized by curves with shallower slopes and poorer performance at endpoints. These data are from Joanisse et al. (unpublished data). Other studies showing similar effects include those described in Refs 25,30. phonemes (e.g. recognizing that bat and ball have the same first sound)34 and poor ‘phonological awareness’, as measured by tasks requiring them to analyse a word into its constituent segments35. How could an impairment in phonological representation yield the particular kinds of grammatical impairments observed in SLI? Consider first the deficit in inflectional morphology. The rule governing past tense formation in English is as follows: If the final phoneme of a present tense verb is a voiceless consonant, then add /t/; if it is a voiced consonant or a vowel, then add /d/; and if it is an alveolar stop (/t/ or /d/) insert an unstressed vowel as well as /d/. This is illustrated in (1–3) below; phonetic transcriptions are in parentheses: (1) bake → baked (beyk-t), rip → ripped (rIp-t) (2) try → tried (traj-d), file → filed (fajl-d) (3) bait → baited (bejt-Id), seed → seeded (sid-Id) The past tense rule illustrates the fact that many morphological rules have important phonological components; they do not merely involve concatenating an affix to a base form. There are three phonological realizations (‘allomorphs’) of the English past tense morpheme; which form is appropriate for a given verb is entirely determined by the identity of the final phoneme. In order to learn and use the rule, children must be able to analyse phonologically the alternation and the conditions under which particular forms occur. Performing this analysis would clearly be more difficult in the face of a perceptual impairment like the one demonstrated in Fig. 1, because of the relatively weak perceptual salience of the morpheme and because ill-formed phonological representations developed as a result of such a Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1998 243 Review Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment deficit would weaken the ability to analyse and learn how subtle aspects of phonology such as the abstract notions of alveolar and continuant features govern the realization of the past tense inflection. There are several lines of evidence consistent with this account. Hoeffner and McClelland36 used a connectionist model of past tense learning to examine the effects of phonological impairment. The model learned to map from the semantics of a verb to its phonological form. It was trained with either a normal phonological representation or one that was systematically degraded. Like children with SLI, the impaired network had difficulty applying the past tense rule to verbs, even though it was able to repeat accurately words presented to it. Thus the simulation showed that impairing phonology has a significant impact on the capacity to generalize morphological forms. The model also tended to produce a disproportionate number of overgeneralization errors (e.g. eated rather than ate), which is also consistent with SLI. Moreover, it demonstrated how the ability to produce a past tense form like paid can be impaired in children who are nevertheless capable of producing phonologically similar forms like raid. Thus, a phonological impairment can be severe enough to interfere with the more difficult task of generating the past tense of a word while supporting the simpler task of repeating a word. Finally, the model also tended to produce errors of omission (failing to produce a form where appropriate) rather than errors of commission (producing a form where it is not appropriate), consistent with the behavior of SLI children. The network acquired some knowledge of the past tense alternation, and could produce some appropriate forms. Its knowledge was imperfect, however, and errors tended to involve defaulting to the more basic, uninflected form. Additional support is provided by studies of morphological impairments following brain injury. Ullman et al.37 have observed morphological deficits in patients with Broca’s aphasia and Parkinson’s Disease consistent with those in SLI; affected patients have difficulty using morphological rules, particularly when applying them to nonsense words (e.g. strimped ). Joanisse and Seidenberg (unpublished data) explored the possibility that these patients’ deficit is caused by a phonological impairment by training a connectionist model on English past tense formation, and simulating the effects of damage to brain areas responsible for phonological processing. Damage to phonological representations had a larger impact on generalization than on learning individual verbs. Their results are consistent with the morphological deficits observed in aphasic patients, and further illustrate the importance of phonological representations in learning and using morphology. Finally, the idea that the deficit in inflectional morphology is secondary to a phonological impairment is also supported by evidence concerning related impairments in reading. Perhaps the leading hypothesis about developmental dyslexia is that it is usually secondary to a phonological impairment38. Dyslexic children fail to develop segmental phonological representations, which interferes with learning the correspondences between spelling and sound. Like the past tense, the pronunciations of most words are rule governed (e.g. gave, save, pave; mint, hint, lint) but there are 244 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, many exceptions such as have and pint. Both behavioral and simulation modeling research indicate that being able to represent knowledge of spelling–sound correspondences in a way that supports generalization (the pronunciation of novel letter strings such as mave) can be impaired as a result of poor phonological representations16,38. Thus, both phonologically impaired dyslexics and SLI children exhibit impaired use of phonology and impaired acquisition of linguistic regularities. The relationship between the two types of impairment is poorly understood; SLI children are typically dyslexic but many dyslexics do not have other language impairments. Whether phonological dyslexia represents a milder form of the impairment in SLI is the focus of current research. Salience and frequency effects Phonological aspects of inflectional morphology are also implicated in studies showing that the perceptual salience of these morphemes affects SLI children’s performance. In English, inflectional morphemes happen to be word-final and unstressed. Thus, it is hard to determine whether the impaired use of these morphemes reflects their grammatical status or their lack of perceptual salience. Cross-linguistic studies by Leonard et al.17,39 and others have clarified this issue considerably. Italian- and Hebrew-speaking children with SLI have less difficulty with grammatical morphemes that occur in stressed syllables than with ones in unstressed syllables. Clearly an information-processing impairment that affects the development of phonological representations will have a greater effect on phonemes that are not perceptually salient. Gopnik7,21 has challenged the claim that perceptual salience is relevant, citing the case of an apparently acoustically salient grammatical morpheme that children with SLI still find difficult. Japanese marks the honorific past tense with -mashita, which is more salient than English past-tense morphology. Japanese SLI children were claimed to be just as impaired on this form as on less salient morphemes. However, the study cited by Gopnik tested eight Japanese SLI children on only two instances of the -mashita morpheme, and failed to apply the proper controls to determine whether such a deficit represents a deviant pattern in the development of Japanese; thus, the study’s authors acknowledge that it should be treated as preliminary18. Nevertheless, the case of -mashita is a useful illustration of the non-obvious complications governing the acquisition and use of many morphemes. As in English, the regular (non-honorific) Japanese past tense morpheme exhibits allomorphy, surfacing as either -ta or -da, as illustrated in (4). Also as in English, the perceptibility of this morpheme is weak, because of its duration and word-final position. (4) kai - ta (write; past tense) yon - da (read; past tense) (5) kaki - mashi - ta (write; hon-past tense) yomi - mashi - ta (read; hon-past tense) Comparing the cases in (4) to the honorific past tense versions of the same words in (5) reveals that although -mashita is highly perceptible in isolation, the verb stems kai and yon change to kaki and yomi when followed by July 1998 Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment -mashi-. It might therefore be difficult for a child with disordered phonology to segment the -mashi morpheme, which requires recognizing the commonalties between yon-da and yomi-mashita, in order to determine where the verb root ends and the grammatical morpheme begins. The studies by Leonard and others provide strong evidence that children with SLI are impaired in learning aspects of morphology that lack perceptual salience. However, it is clear that other factors must be relevant as well. Consider, for example, the /-s/ morpheme in English, which is used to mark both plural nouns (cats) and third person singular verbs (bakes). Leonard et al.39 found that children with SLI were much better at producing it as a plural noun marker (79% correct) than as a third person verb marker (7% correct). This effect cannot be solely due to perceptibility because the two morphemes are phonologically identical and occur in similar phonological contexts. However, the two do differ greatly in terms of how often they occur in everyday usage. The third person morpheme (bakes) is used relatively rarely (4.3% of the time in adults) while the plural noun morpheme (cats) is relatively frequent (26.7% of the time in adults). (These frequency data are drawn from Ref. 39, and represent how frequently the plural or third person (-s) form occurs, as a percentage of overall noun or verb frequencies in the database.) Hence SLI children will have had many more exposures to the plural than the third person marker, enhancing their ability to learn some forms, while making other forms more difficult to learn. This is not surprising, given that frequency of exposure has a large impact on learning in people as well as in connectionist networks of the type described above8. Syntactic deficits The syntactic impairments observed in SLI can also be related to phonology, in particular the role of phonological information in sentence processing. Comprehension routinely requires holding information in memory while other processing operations continue. Sentences cannot be understood word by word because they exhibit structural discontinuities. In (6), for example, the noun phrase the man is associated with the verb likes which appears eight words later: (6) The man who is wearing a large green hat likes Mary. Studies of processes that occur as such sentences are read or heard indicate that information is retained in a phonological form41,42; phonology is particularly relevant to briefly retaining information concerning the literal sequence of words in a sentence. This plays a role in resolving several kinds of ambiguities, illustrated by sentences (7,8) in which the comprehender must determine who liked and who left: (7) The intern who the president liked left. (8) The intern who liked the president left. One view of these phenomena is that language comprehension involves using a limited capacity working memory system41–43. Although these theories differ in detail, they share the idea that partial results of comprehension Review processes are stored in a phonological code. Given the evidence concerning phonological representation and processing deficits in SLI, it is not surprising that several studies have demonstrated working memory deficits in these children32,44. Because working memory is particularly relevant to processing complex sentence structures in normal children and adults42,43, it follows that SLI children with impaired phonology should exhibit impairments in sentence processing, consistent with the behavioral literature. A more recent theory45 holds that working memory is not a separate storage system; rather, the neural network responsible for processing sentences itself has limited capacities. When words are recognized in reading or listening they activate phonological codes that facilitate retaining and integrating information over time. As in the standard account, phonological anomalies affect the processing of more complex structures. Phonological information may also be relevant to the acquisition of syntactic knowledge11. Consider for example the van der Lely and Stollwerck study23 indicating that children with SLI have difficulty comprehending sentences such as (9 and 10) below: (9) Mowgli says Baloo Bear is tickling him. (10) Mowgli says Baloo Bear is tickling himself. It is doubtful that the children’s problem with (9) and (10) relates to the perceptual salience of him and himself. However, these sentences are representative of the kinds of structures that place significant demands on working memory. Moreover, the difference between (9) and (10) turns on configural (i.e. hierarchical rather than linear) aspects of syntax that affect whether an anaphor can or cannot refer to a particular noun phrase. Impairments in working memory, stemming from phonological coding deficits, could therefore make it difficult for a child to learn the grammatical principles that differentiate the two sentence types. Corroborative evidence is again available from studies of reading disability: Shankweiler and colleagues have found strong correlations between perceptual-phonological deficits and syntactic processing abilities in dyslexics46. This account also explains why children with SLI are less impaired – though not completely normal – in processing sentences such as (11) in which non-syntactic information (about gender) provides a basis for inferring an interpretation. (11) Mowgli says Mother Wolf is tickling him. Because children with SLI are aware that him never refers to females like Mother wolf, they can use this type of information to resolve sentences like (11), without resorting to the more complex strategy of analysing syntactic relations. van der Lely and Stollwerck concluded that their results reflect an impairment specific to the use of the binding principles rather than a more general difficulty understanding the meaning of words and sentences. However, SLI subjects in this study were well above chance in correctly labeling sentences like (9) and (10), in most cases better than 75% correct. This would suggest that affected children do have some knowledge of the relevant grammatical principles, but that other factors, such as a limitation on working Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1998 245 Review Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment 13 Benton, A. (1964) Developmental aphasia and brain damage Cortex 1, Outstanding questions 40–52 • How selective are the linguistic impairments in SLI? More thorough studies are needed that carefully examine multiple aspects of language in individual subjects. • What other perceptual, memory, learning, and motoric capacities are impaired along with language? • How much variation is there among children categorized as SLI in studies of grammatical impairments? • What is the nature of the perceptual deficit in SLI? There is conflicting evidence as to whether it is limited to a few speech sounds or extends to all types of speech contrasts. Does the deficit also extend to nonlinguistic aspects of audition or other modalities? • What is the nature of the genetic mechanisms involved in some cases of SLI? What is the relationship between genetic anomalies and brain development? Why do certain genetic anomalies lead to particular linguistic and cognitive deficits? • What is the relationship between SLI and developmental dyslexia? One possibility is that developmental dyslexia involves a milder type of phonological impairment that leaves language-learning intact but has considerable impact on reading. 14 Ewing, A.W.G. (1930) Aphasia in Children, Oxford University Press 15 Rapin, I. and Allen, D. (1987) Developmental dysphasia and autism in pre-school children: characteristics and subtypes, in Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Specific Speech and Language Disorders in Children, Association of All Speech Impaired Children 16 Manis, F. et al. (1996) On the basis of two subtypes of developmental dyslexia Cognition 58, 157–195 17 Leonard, L.B. and Eyer, J.A. (1996) Deficits of grammatical morphology in children with specific language impairment and their implications for notions of bootstrapping, in Signal to Syntax (Morgan, J. and Demuth, K., eds), Erlbaum 18 Fukuda S. and Fukuda, S. (1994) Developmental language impairments in Japanese: a linguistic investigation, in McGill Working Papers In Linguistics (Vol. 10) (Matthews, J., ed.), pp. 150–177, McGill University Department of Linguistics 19 Dalalakis, J. (1994) Familial language impairment in Greek, in McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 10) (Matthews, J., ed.), pp. 216–228 20 Rice, M.L. and Wexler, K. (1996) A phenotype of specific language impairment: extended optional infinitives, in Towards a Genetics of Language (Rice, M.L., ed.), pp. 215–237, Erlbaum 21 Gopnik, M. and Goad, H. (1997) What underlies inflectional errors in memory, are interfering with the ability to use this knowledge in sentences. Conclusion Recent interest in SLI by linguists has greatly increased our knowledge of the grammatical deficits in language-impaired individuals. However, the basis for these impairments is as yet unclear. Some have assumed that these grammatical impairments must result from genetic and neurobiological anomalies that affect the development of ‘universal grammar’, the innate grammatical module of the brain. They have further assumed that the other deficits exhibited by these children are unrelated co-occurring symptoms. We have briefly summarized some of the kinds of evidence that suggest how linguistic impairments could follow from more basic information-processing deficits that interfere with learning and memory. The challenges that confront this approach are to gain a better understanding of the nature of perceptual deficits in SLI and how they could lead to the specific problems in learning language that have been described in linguistic research. SLI? J. Neurolinguistics 10(2–3), 109–237 22 van der Lely, H.K.J. and Harris, M. (1990) Comprehension of reversible sentences in specifically language impaired children J. Speech Hear. Disord. 55, 101–117 23 van der Lely, H.K.J. and Stollwerck, L. (1997) Binding theory and grammatical specific language impairment in children Cognition 62, 245–290 24 Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris 25 Elliott, L.L., Hammer, M.A. and Scholl, M.E. (1990) Fine-grained auditory discrimination in normal children and children with language-learning problems J. Speech Hear. Res. 32, 112–119 26 Tallal, P. (1990) Fine-grained discrimination deficits in languagelearning impaired children are specific neither to the auditory modality nor to speech perception J. Speech Hear. Res. 33, 616–617 27 Tallal, P. et al. (1996) Language comprehension in language-learning impaired children improved with acoustically modified speech Science 272, 81–84 28 Krauss, N. et al. (1996) Auditory neurophysiologic responses and discrimination deficits in children with learning problems Science 273, 971–973 29 Ludlow, C. et al. (1983) Auditory processing skills of hyperactive, language-impaired and reading-disabled boys, in Central Auditory Processing Disorders: Problems of Speech, Language, and Learning (Katz, J. and Lasky, E., eds), pp. 163–184, Baltimore: University Park 30 Stark, R.E. and Heinz, J.M. (1996) Vowel perception in children with and without language impairment J. Speech Hear. Res. 39, 860–869 31 Bernstein, L.E. and Stark, R.E. (1985) Speech perception development in language-impaired children: a four-year follow-up J. Speech Hear. References Disord. 50, 21–30 1 Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, MIT Press 2 Gold, E.M. (1967) Language identification in the limit Inf. Control 10, 32 Gathercole, S.E. and Baddeley, A.D. (1990) Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: is there a causal connection? 447–474 J. Mem. Lang. 29, 336–360 3 Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language, MIT Press 4 Pinker, S. (1989) Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of 33 Leonard, Phonological deficits in children with phonemes in phonologically impaired children Eur. J. Disord. 6 Gopnik, M. and Crago, M. (1991) Familial aggregation of a Commun. 27, 289–311 developmental language disorder Cognition 39, 1–50 7 Gopnik, M. (1997) Language deficits and genetic factors Trends 35 Kamhi, A.G. and Catts, H. (1986) Toward an understanding of developmental and reading disorders J. Speech and Hear. Disord. 51, Cognit. Sci. 1, 5–9 337–347 8 Seidenberg, M.S. (1997) Language-acquisition and use: learning and 36 Hoeffner, J.H. and McClelland, J.L. (1993) Can a perceptual processing applying probabilistic constraints Science 275, 1599–1603 deficit explain the impairment of inflectional morphology in 9 Elman, J. et al. (1996) Rethinking Innateness, MIT Press development dysphasia? A computational investigation Proceedings 10 Saffran, J., Aslin, R. and Newport, E. (1996) Statistical learning by 8- of the 25th Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum month old infants Science 274, 1926–1928 (Clark, E.V., ed.), pp. 39–45, Centre for the Study of Language and 11 Bishop, D.V.M. 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(1997) Are speech perception deficits associated with developmental dyslexia? J. Exp. Child Psychol. 66, 211–235 comprehension: critique of Just and Carpenter Psych. Rev. 103, 761–772 39 Leonard, L.B. et al. (1987) Specific language impairment in children: a cross-linguistic study Brain Lang. 32, 233–252 44 Montgomery, J.W. (1995) Examination of phonological working memory in specifically language-impaired children Appl. Psycholinguist. 40 Francis, W.N. and Kucera, H. (1982) Frequency Analysis of English 16, 355–378 45 Christiansen, M.H. and MacDonald, M.C. Fractionated working Usage: Lexicon and Grammar, Houghton–Mifflin 41 Baddeley, A., Vallar, G. and Wilson, B. (1987) Sentence comprehension and phonological memory: some neuropsychological evidence, in Attention and Performance Vol. 12: The Psychology of Reading (Coltheart, M., ed.), pp. 509–529, Erlbaum memory: even in pebbles, it’s still a soup stone Behav. Brain Sci. (in press) 46 Shankweiler, D. et al. (1995) Cognitive profiles of reading-disabled children: comparison of language skills in phonology, morphology and 42 Just, M.A. and Carpenter, P.A. (1992) A capacity theory of comprehension: syntax Psychol. Sci. 6,149–156 Crossmodal identification Gemma A. Calvert, Michael J. Brammer and Susan D. Iversen Everyday experience involves the continuous integration of information from multiple sensory inputs. Such crossmodal interactions are advantageous since the combined action of different sensory cues can provide information unavailable from their individual operation, reducing perceptual ambiguity and enhancing responsiveness. The behavioural consequences of such multimodal processes and their putative neural mechanisms have been investigated extensively with respect to orienting behaviour and, to a lesser extent, the crossmodal coordination of spatial attention. These operations are concerned mainly with the determination of stimulus location. However, information from different sensory streams can also be combined to assist stimulus identification. Psychophysical and physiological data indicate that these two crossmodal processes are subject to different temporal and spatial constraints both at the behavioural and neuronal level and involve the participation of distinct neural substrates. Here we review the evidence for such a dissociation and discuss recent neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and neuroimaging findings that shed light on the mechanisms underlying crossmodal identification, with specific reference to audio–visual speech perception. E volution has furnished humans with several different senses, each tuned to a distinct form of energy and providing a unique window through which to experience the environment. The possession of multiple sensory systems provides considerable behavioural flexibility since input from one modality can substitute for another under circumstances of specific sensory deprivation. In darkness, for example, auditory and tactile cues might supplant visual information. Such polysensory capability also permits the integration of different sensory streams. Combining sensory inputs is clearly advantageous since it supplies information about the environment that is unavailable from any single modality, influencing the perception of events in the surroundings and our subsequent responses. The many behavioural consequences of multimodal integration have been investigated extensively with respect to orienting and attentive behaviours, primarily concerned with the determination of stimulus location (for reviews, see Stein and Meredith1; Driver and Spence2, this issue). In addition to facilitating the detection of, and orientation to, stimuli in the environment3,4, the integration of different sensory cues has also been shown to influence localization judgements. Specifically, when two or more sensory events are in close temporal proximity, albeit in slightly distinct spatial locations, they are generally perceived as emanating from a common source5–7. Typically, the modality with the best spatial resolution (e.g. vision’s superiority over audition) has the greatest influence on the location of the fused percept. Such crossmodal influences on localization are perhaps best typified by the ventriloquist’s illusion. The ventriloquist speaks without moving his lips but it is his puppet that seems to be talking. Copyright © 1998, Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1364-6613/98/$19.00 PII: S1364-6613(98)01189-9 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7, July 1998 G.A. Calvert is at the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, University of Oxford, John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, UK OX3 9DU. M.J. Brammer is at the Department of Biostatistics and Computing, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK. S.D. Iversen is at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK. tel: +44 1865 222738 fax: +44 1865 222717 e-mail: gemma@ fMRIB.ox.ac.uk 247 2018/4/5 Write-up 7: SLI and Auditory processing Write‐up 7: SLI and Auditory processing Submit Assignment Due Wednesday by 8am Points 20 Submitting a text entry box or a file upload Welcome to the last write­up! This write­up focuses on your ability to argue like a pro. Our discussion of (Specific) Language Impairment built on two influential review articles: Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1998 Gopnik, 1997 (One of our optional reading assignments) (Discussed in slides, but not assigned for reading) These two review articles take opposite sides on the debate of whether SLI reflects a grammar­specific impairment, or whether it reflects the consequences of a lower­level auditory impairment. Your assignment is to: 1. (Re­)read these two review articles 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Pick a side/hypothesis ­­ which one is more convincing to you? Briefly summarize the key points of the side you choose (200­300 words) Now go back to the other side: What is the strongest argument they have in their favor? Summarize that counter­argument (100­200 words) Now reply to that argument: Is there a way to reconcile that counter­argument with the side that you have selected? (100­200 words) This write­up may be slightly longer than previous ones, but should be no more than 750 words (about 1.5 pages, single spaced). For guidelines, hints, or tricks, think back to previous write­ups! You've already developed the necessary skills in summarizing research findings (W3, W5), evaluating evidence (W1, W2, W4, W6), critiquing conclusions (W5, W6) and reconciling conflict (W6). Now you just have to put them all together . Argument and Counterargument https://umich.instructure.com/courses/202276/assignments/440149 1/2 2018/4/5 Write-up 7: SLI and Auditory processing Criteria Pick a side Ratings Pts 1.0 pts Full Marks The write­up takes a clear position up front on the debate about whether SLI is a grammar­specific deficit or whether it follows from an auditory deficit. Summarize key points Summarize counter­ argument Reply to counter­ argument Style 3.0 pts Full Marks 1.5 pts Partial The selected position is clearly and accurately described. Key evidence in favor of the position is mentioned. Basically, the write­up answers "Why would a reasonable person believe this theory?" 2.0 pts Full Marks The selected position is described but may not be entirely accurate. Evidence may be mentioned, but some connections between the evidence and the relevant hypothesis may be implicit or inaccurate. 1.0 pts Partial A counter­argument to the selected position is clearly and accurately described. The conflict between the counter­argument and the selected position is explicit. The counter­argument is firmly connected to the review article(s) used in this assignment. 3.0 pts Full Marks A counter­argument is mentioned. The argument may include some minor inaccuracies, and/or the conflict between the counter­ argument and the selected position may be muddied or implicit. 1.5 pts Partial A good­faith effort is made to consider how to reconcile the counter­argument with the selected position. This may involve recognizing that the two sides are addressing different problems (e.g. different aspects of processing, or different sub­populations), or by developing an account whereby one theory could accommodate the counter­argument, or in some other way. Assertions that the counter­argument *cannot* be accommodated are only acceptable if the write­up shows how a good­faith effort fails to reconcile the two sides. 1.0 pts Full Marks At least one specific strategy to reconcile the counter­ argument with the selected position is given, but it may be stated indirectly or implicitly. Whether or not evidence exists that favors the strategy may not be discussed. The connection between the strategies and the conflict can be inferred from the text. Write­up is appropriate for first­draft college­level assignment: it is organized and focused with fluent word­choice and grammar. The write­up falls within the length requirements. Assignment completed 10.0 pts Full Marks 0.0 pts No Marks 0.0 pts No Marks 0.0 pts No Marks 1.0 pts 3.0 pts 0.0 pts No Marks 2.0 pts 0.0 pts No Marks 3.0 pts 0.0 pts No Marks 1.0 pts 10.0 pts Total Points: 20.0 https://umich.instructure.com/courses/202276/assignments/440149 2/2
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