Sentence comprehension in children developing typically, children with language impairment, and Spanish-English bilingual children: Behavipresentation and eye-tracking evidence

This study examined the mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension in three groups of children ages 9-14: children who are typically developing (TD), children with language impairment (LI), and Spanish-English bilinguals (EL). We used behavipresentation and eye tracking measures to answer: Does auditory working memory (AWM) influence canonical and non-canonical sentence processing in similar manners in children in the LI, TD, and EL groups? Eye movements were recorded while participants listened to one of four sentence types and identified the agent in the sentence. Agent selection accuracy and fixation time on the agent were analyzed using multilevel modeling. The model predicted that children with low AWM have lower accuracy selecting the agent for noncanonical sentences compared to canonical sentences regardless of their grouping, even though increases in AWM had a stronger role in the accuracy of noncanonical sentences for all groups. Fixation time on the agent increased as a function of increases in AWM similarly for the EL and LI groups for all sentence types and to a lesser degree in noncanonical sentences for the TD group. However, in the canonical sentences, for the TD group, fixation time on the agent decreased as a function of increases in AWM. In the canonical passive sentence type, increases in AWM predicted more fixation time on the patient for all groups. Findings suggest that AWM plays a larger role for comprehension of noncanonical sentence types than canonical sentence types and differentially affects comprehension of EL, TD, and LI groups