Transcript Document

Attending to & describing motion events
in children with SLI
7724
Shanju Lin & Amanda J. Owen Van Horne
Dept of Communication Sciences and Disorders & DeLTA Center
University of Iowa
Introduction
Motion events
• One object moves with respect to another object.
Element
Manner
Example
Talmy, 1975, 1985
• Involves cognition and language
run, walk, jump, fly, roll
leave, exit, enter,
Path
through, over, under
Ground:
The boy jumped from
Source & Goal the tree /to the ground.
• English speakers tend to describe motion
events in manner verbs and use
prepositional phrases for path, source
and goal.
Children with TD
• Cognition and language of motion events are early developed.
- 18-month-olds detect object, trajectory, and the whole motion.
Raskin & Poulin-Dubois, 2002
- By age 3, language-specific expressions are learned.
Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Sebastián & Slobin, 1994
• Regardless of language and age, speakers show similar perception for motion
elements.
Gennari et al., 2002, Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep;
Papafragou et al., 2002, Papafragou & Selimis, 2010
• Amount of information included in motion description increases with age.
Chen & Guo, 2010; Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep; Slobin, 2004
Children with SLI
• Often described as having a gap between their linguistic and cognitive abilities
• Use more general-all-purpose (GAP) verbs (e.g., come, go) rather than
specific verbs expressing manner or path (e.g., jump, enter)
Rice & Bode, 1993
• Have weaker semantic representations for verbs
McGregor et al., 2012
• Have different biases
• when interpreting novel verbs: result-oriented interpretation, rather than
motion interpretation
Kelly & Rice, 1994
• when learning verb argument structures: more errors for change-of-state
verbs (e.g., fill, cover) than change-of-location verbs (e.g., put, pour)
Ebbels, et al., 2007
Research Questions
1. Do children with SLI attend to and describe same motion
elements as their TD peers?
2. If there are attentional biases in children with SLI, are those
biases associated with description biases?
Method
Stimuli
Participants
M
(range)
MLU
SLI
AGE
N
17
17
17
Age
MLUw
• Categorization task: Which of two change videos
goes with the baseline video?
24 triads of videos
Manner
4;7
7;1
7;1
(4;0 - 4;11)
(4;2 - 9;10)
(4;3 - 9;11)
6.38
6.48
7.73
(5.30 - 7.74)
(5.42 - 7.5)
(5.04 - 10)
Nonvehicle
jump, walk, roll
Vehicle
drive a car, ride a
motorcycle, fly an airplane
Path
Middle object over, under, through
Source
& Goal
2 of each present in each baseline.
Minimal pairs switched locations, not items.
Baseline
Change videos:
SPELT-3
CELF-4
ELI
KBIT - 2
113.82
78.5
112.82
(100-127)
(73 – 86)
(104 -122)
110.53
69.89
113.94
(96 - 130)
(51 - 85)
(93 - 130)
104.76
95.18
113
(92 – 130)
(80 – 130)
(89 - 130)
Differ minimally from the
baseline on Manner, Path,
Source, or Goal to examine
element bias/priority
Manner Change
Goal Change
• Description task: Describe the 24 baseline videos
Tasks adapted from Papafragou et al. (2002) & Gennari et al. (2002)
Description Coding
Example
# Elements
Elements
He is driving to the swing.
2
Manner, Goal
The ant go to the truck.
1
Goal
The pig flew under the bridge and flew to the castle.
The airplane go underneath the net and then he go to the
balloon so he can pop them.
3
Manner, Path, Goal
2
Path, Goal
Results
Categorization task
Proportion for element bias
1.00
0.80
*
MLU
SLI
AGE
*
• All children fail to notice Source changes or consider them
less relevant.
• SLI group show a stronger Goal bias.
0.60
• MLU group show a stronger Source bias, but not stronger
than other element biases.
*
*
0.40
Element Bias: F(3,201)=90.230, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.574
S < M, P, G, p < .001; G < M, P, p < .05
M = P, p > .99
Group x Element Bias: F(9,201)=2.258, p = .02, ηp2 = 0.091
Goal:
SLI > AGE, p = .046; SLI > MLU, p = .044
Source: SLI < MLU, p = .041; AGE < MLU, p = .01
All other group comparisons n.s., p > .103
Group: F(3,67)=0.073, p = .974
0.20
0.00
Manner
Path
Goal
Source
Description task
Avg. number of elements
mentioned
*
4
*
3
2
1
2.59
1.62
1.97
0
MLU
SLI
Proportion of element mentioned
1.0
AGE
*
*
*
MLU
SLI
0.8
*
AGE
*
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
Manner
F(2,48)=9.489, p < .001, η2 = 0.28
SLI < AGE, p = .003
MLU < AGE, p < .001
SLI = MLU, p = .383
*
Path
Goal
Source
Group: F(2,48)=9.491, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.283
SLI < AGE, p = .003, MLU < AGE, p < .001
Element: F(3,144)=36.428, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.431
M = P = G > S (S vs. other, p < .001)
Group x Element:
F(6,144)=4.744, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.165
Manner: SLI < MLU, p = .02
SLI = AGE, p = .134
Path:
AGE > MLU, p = .006
Goal:
SLI > MLU, p = .003
AGE > MLU, p = .001
Source: SLI < AGE, p = .003
MLU < AGE, p = .003
All other group comparisons n.s. all p >.17
•
Compared to AGE group, SLI group are less likely to describe Source
(and marginal for Manner)
•
SLI group show a strong Goal Bias
• The chicken wented to the swingset.
• The ant goed to the truck.
SLI & MLU-matches both tended to
mention between 1 & 2 motion elements.
MLU group show a strong Manner Bias
Age-matches: between 2 & 3
• A hippo was driving a car.
• A pig was flying.
•
AGE group talk about Path, Goal, and Source more than MLU group.
Conclusions
• Children with SLI attend to and talk about different motion elements compared
to their TD peers.
- Children with SLI show attentional biases on goal, which is consistent with the
fact that their responses tend to include goal also.
- They rely heavily on GAP verbs, making it less likely that they mention manner.
• Goal is perceptually salient to children with SLI and thus may lead weaker
representations of manner verbs.
- Goal represents a final reference point and is often more persistent in the stimuli.
- Following Kelly & Rice (1993), children with SLI may have different attentional
biases such that they notice results, which change their verb learning profiles.
- Following Ebbels et al. (2007), children with SLI show weaker semantic
representations of change-of-state verbs than change-of-location verbs
• We hypothesize that weak verb representations (McGregor, et al., 2012) in
children with SLI may be related to language deficits and attentional biases.
- If children with SLI do not attend equally well to some elements in events, their
representations of elements like manner might be relatively weak and less likely
to be associated with a verb.
Clinical Implications
•
Teach verbs and test children’s verb use in more complex contexts, e.g., multiple
motion elements
•
Direct children’s attention to manner when teaching motion verbs
•
Teach manner verbs with various prepositional phrases (over, under, from, to, etc)
Works Cited
Berman, R., & Slobin, D. I. (Eds.). (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. GoldinMeadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 387-427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chen, L., & Guo, J. (2010). From language structures to language use: A case from Mandarin motion expression classification. Chinese Language and
Discourse, 1(1), 31-65.
Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns.
Cognition, 41, 83-122..
Ebbels, S.H., van der Lely, H.K, & Dockrell, J.E. (2007). Intervention for verb argument structure in children with persistent SLI: A randomized control trial.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 1330-1349.
Finneran, D. A., Francis, A. L., & Leonard, L. B. (2009). Sustained attention in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Speech, Language,
and Hearing Research, 52(4), 915-929.
Gennari, S., Sloman, S., Malt, B., & Fitch, W. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. Cognition, 83, 49-79.
Kelly, D. J. & Rice, M. L. (1993). Preferences for verb interpretation in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research,
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Lin, S. & Owen Van Horne, A.J. (in preparation). Describing complex motion events in English- and Mandarin-speaking children: testing verb advantage
hypothesis.
McGregor, K. K., Berns, A. J., Owen, A. J., Michels, S. A., Duff, D., Bahnsen, A. J., et al. (2012). Associations between syntax and the lexicon among children
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Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 219-257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. IV, pp. 181-238). New York: Academic Press.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Karla McGregor, Bob McMurray, Word learning Lab, and MACLab at the University of Iowa for help and
comments on the experimental design and stimuli. We also thank Allison Haskill at Augustana College, Betty
Merrifield and the Scottish Rite Program, and Grantwood AEA for all the help with this project, and the members of
Grammar Acquisition Lab at University of Iowa for data collection. This project is funded by a Pre-doctoral
Scholarship from Ministry of Education, Taiwan awarded to Shanju Lin, and a University of Iowa Internal Funding
Initiative awarded to Amanda J. Owen Van Horne.
Contacts: [email protected], [email protected]