Syntactic Structural Assignment in Brazilian Portuguese- Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment Nih Public Access Syntactic Aspects of the Hod Hypothesis Syntactic Structural Assignment and Reflexives Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension Cross-linguistic Issues General Method

Purpose—In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses. Method—Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4–l 0;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (±3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task. Results—Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition. Conclusion—The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension. One characteristic of specific language impairment (SLI) is a deficit in the comprehension and production of sentences, particularly those that involve long-distance relationships. Several proposals have focused on the computational grammatical complexity (CGC) hypothesis, which posits deficits in the computational grammatical system that effect hierarchically complex structures in one or more components (syntax, morphology, phonology) of language (Gallon, Harris, & van der Lely, 2007; Marinis & van der Lely, The hierarchical ordering deficit(HOD)account (Cromer, 1978), an historical predecessor of CGC, suggests that children with language impairment do not assign structure to sentences in the same way as their typically developing peers. According to this account, children with language impairment represent sentences as flat instead of hierarchically organized structures, and the absence of hierarchical relations within the sentence structure would account for their overall difficulties with sentence comprehension. The HOD account concerns children with language disorders, but because the discussion and definition of SLI had not yet emerged by the late 1970s, this hypothesis has not been directly studied in children with SLI. Bishop (1982) examined the HOD hypothesis in children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome who may exhibit some similar language deficits to children with SLI In that study, Bishop tested …