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
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April 1997
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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
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word on the computer screen is a real word in their language
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Universitat
4 leonard, l. (1994) Some problems facing accounts of morphological
ing is whether they process linguistically complex words, like
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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
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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
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or 'zash': the language-impaired subjeers process both simple
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and complex words at the same rate. Whether you look at
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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
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(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
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April 1997
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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
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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
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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
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22 Paradis, M. and Gopnik, M. Compensatory strategies in genetic
Review
a cross-linguistic study 1.
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dysphasia: declarative memory 1. Neurotiriqutsrics (in press)
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evidence for a pervasive temporal processing disorder Reading and
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30 Gopnik, M. (1994) The perceptual processing hypothesis revisited, in
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. (1997) Uncommon Understanding: Development and
Information, Stanford, California
Disorders of Language Comprehension in Children, Psychology Press
12 Leonard, L. (1997) Children with Specific Language Impairments, MIT
37 Ullman, M. et al. (1997) A neural dissociation within language:
evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory and
Press
Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 7,
(1982)
34 Bird, J. and Bishop, D.V.M. (1992) Perception and awareness of
5 Pinker, S. (1989) The Language Instinct, Harper Collins
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L.B.
developmental language impairment Brain Lang. 16, 73–86
Argument Structure, MIT Press
July 1998
Joanisse and Seidenberg – Specific language impairment
that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system J. Cogn.
Review
individual differences in working memory Psych. Rev. 99, 122–149
43 Waters, G. and Caplan, D. (1992) The capacity theory of sentence
Neurosci. 9, 266–276
38 Manis, F. et al. (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
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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
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