Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third‐person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro‐drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD.

中文翻译：

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用英语和西班牙语模拟典型发育儿童和发育性语言障碍儿童的动词变化习得

患有发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 的儿童在语言能力方面存在显着缺陷，这不能归因于神经损伤、听力障碍或智力障碍。DLD 儿童表现出的症状因语言而异。在英语中，DLD 通常以获取动词变化的严重困难为标志。这种困难在西班牙语和意大利语等具有丰富动词形态的语言中不那么明显。在这里，我们展示了如何根据输入语言的属性之间的相互作用以及孩子学习句子中分离的语言元素之间的预测关系的能力来理解这些差异配置文件。我们将一个简单的联想学习模型应用于连续的英语和西班牙语刺激，并展示了该模型如何 将较早出现的线索与较晚的结果联系起来的能力对英语动词变化的习得影响大于西班牙语。我们将此与英语裸形式的高频（作为默认）和英语问题形成过程联系起来，这意味着（与西班牙语不同）裸形式经常出现在第三人称单数上下文中。最后，我们假设西班牙语的亲删除性质比英语更容易将人称和数字线索与动词屈折联系起来。由于在西班牙语中导致英语动词变化对顺序学习能力较弱的学习者特别具有挑战性的因素大大减少或不存在，这就解释了为什么学习西班牙语动词变化在患有 DLD 的儿童中相对不受影响。