ABSTRACT

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) need more exposures to learn new words in an unambiguous context compared to children with typical development (TD). However, it remains unclear whether they would be able to learn new words by extracting frequencies over multiple word-object encounters in ambiguous situations. The present study examines this question through a cross-situational statistical-learning task (CSSL). Thirty-eight school-aged children with DLD and thirty-eight age/sex-matched TD children completed a CSSL eye-tracking experiment. Participants’ responses show that children with DLD had significantly poorer accuracy compared to TD children. However, both groups performed above chance. While the eye-tracking record evidenced no distinctive pattern between groups as children learnt new words, we observed a larger target visual preference in TD children when they were asked to find the referent for those new words. We discuss these findings in light of existing accounts for memory and language deficits in DLD.

摘要

与典型发育 (TD) 的儿童相比，发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 的儿童需要更多的接触才能在明确的上下文中学习新单词。然而，目前尚不清楚他们是否能够通过在歧义情况下提取多个词 - 对象遇到的频率来学习新词。本研究通过跨情境统计学习任务 (CSSL) 来检验这个问题。38 名患有 DLD 的学龄儿童和 38 名年龄/性别匹配的 TD 儿童完成了 CSSL 眼动追踪实验。参与者的反应表明，与 TD 儿童相比，患有 DLD 的儿童的准确性明显较差。然而，两组的表现都高于机会。虽然眼动追踪记录表明，当孩子们学习新单词时，各组之间没有明显的模式，当要求 TD 儿童找到这些新词的指涉对象时，我们观察到他们有更大的目标视觉偏好。我们根据 DLD 中记忆和语言缺陷的现有解释来讨论这些发现。