Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rakhlin, Natalia
• Kornilov, Sergey A.
• Reich, Jodi
• Grigorenko, Elena L.

Titel

Interpretation of Anaphoric Dependencies in Russian-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Ist Teil von

• Language acquisition, 2015-10, Vol.22 (4), p.355-383

Ort / Verlag

United States: Psychology Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We examined anaphora resolution in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to clarify whether (i) DLD is best understood as missing knowledge of certain linguistic operations/elements or as unreliable performance and (ii) if comprehension of sentences with anaphoric expressions as objects and exceptionally case marked (ECM) subjects supports a particular theoretical account of anaphora. Fifty-four native-Russian-speaking children (age M = 7;06, SD = 1;09) were tested on a picture selection task. Children with DLD (n = 18) underperformed overall but displayed similar patterns to the typically developing (TD) group with respect to the extra difficulty of the ECM relative to the transitive and ECM pronouns relative to all other conditions. However, whereas pronouns were more difficult than reflexives for the TD children, this effect was not significant for the DLD group, whose reduced accuracy on reflexives washed out the effect of pronouns in that group. These results are consistent with performance-level vulnerability in DLD, arguably related to weaknesses in lexical processing and with the Reflexivity framework of Binding phenomena.