Understanding who does what to whom: a comparative study between hearing-impaired and typically-developing children

TABOH, ANALÍ ROSA; GATTEI, CAROLINA; SHALOM, DIEGO EDGAR

Philadelphia

Conferencia; 2021 International Association for the Study of Child Language Conference; 2021

BackgroundUnderstanding who does what to whom in semantically reversible sentences requiresintegrating semantic information provided by the lexico-semantic structure of the verbwith morphosyntactic information such as word order and morphological case marking.Hearing-impaired children who access spoken language through cochlear implants orhearing aids (HIC) often have difficulties comprehending syntactically complex sentencessuch as those with non-canonical word order (Ruigendijk & Friedmann, 2017). They alsooften omit case-marking morphology or use it incorrectly (Szagun, 2000). This work lookedinto how these children establish the linking between morphosyntax and semantics incomprehension. We aimed at (i) evaluating what strategies they use to achieve linkingcorrectly; and (ii) analyzing the acquisition curve of this linguistic ability in HIC andtypically-developing children (TDC).MethodWe compared the performance of Spanish-speaking HIC and TDC with hearing age 3-6 in asentence comprehension task with psychological verbs. In Spanish, some of these verbshave direct linking (i.e. the most salient thematic role coincides with the most salientsyntactic constituent) while others have indirect linking. We used the truth-valuejudgment paradigm (Crain & Thornton, 1998) and manipulated word order (SVO/OVS) andtype of linking (direct/indirect).ResultsResults show at-chance performance at 3-4 years of hearing age for both groups. Asignificant Group difference appears at hearing ages 4;1-5 and 5;1-6, with TDC performingbetter than chance level already at age 4;1-5, and HIC performing better than chancelevel at age 5;1-6.ConclusionThe latter suggests that while the first linking strategy for both TDC and HIC groupsconsists of assigning the most salient thematic role (Experiencer) to the first constituent,the TDC group begins using the morphosyntactic information at an earlier stage than HIC.These results call for further investigation on possible language assessment and therapiesto improve linking strategies for the HIC group.