Investigating early syntactic knowledge in late-talking toddlers

Preza, Tracy

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122288 Copy

Description

Title

Investigating early syntactic knowledge in late-talking toddlers

Author(s)

Preza, Tracy

Contributor(s)

• Hadley, Pamela A.
• Krok, Windi
• Fisher, Cynthia

Issue Date

2024-03-21

Keyword(s)

• late talker
• syntax
• verb
• language development
• speech-language pathology

Abstract

This study examined how language measures motivated by two competing theories of language endowment classified late talkers with transient delays from those at elevated risk for developmental language disorder (DLD). The weak language endowment hypothesis predicts general and specific measures will be normally distributed and significantly differ across three groups: late talkers with continued early language delays (ELD), those with a prior history of early language delay (HELD) and typical toddlers (TD). The language maturation delay hypothesis predicts measures linked to maturation will be bimodally distributed, with the ELD group forming one group, but the HELD and TD group forming another group. Language transcripts from a structural priming task were analyzed for one general measure: the Index of Productive Syntax-C (pIPSyn-C) and two specific measures: primed unaccusative verb diversity and primed subject diversity with unaccusative verbs (e.g., leaf fall) in the ELD (n =21), HELD (n = 23), and TD (n =60) groups. One-way ANCOVAs revealed that the ELD group performed significantly worse that the HELD and TD groups, who were indistinguishable from one another on all measures. ROC curve analyses demonstrated the pIPSyn-C had the best classification accuracy for separating the ELD group from the HELD and TD groups. In contrast, unaccusative verb and subject diversity measures had only fair classification accuracy between the groups. Future work should continue to investigate early syntactic knowledge of late-talking children to inform both theoretical hypotheses of language knowledge, and to improve the prediction of persistent DLD in childhood.

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

R01DC016273

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Tracy Preza

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