Original scientific paper

Anticipatory eye movements and Specific Language Impairment

Marijan Palmović ; Laboratorij za psiholingvistička istraživanja, Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Ines Galić Jušić ; Laboratorij za psiholingvistička istraživanja, Sveučilište u Zagrebu

Abstract

Anticipatory eye movements are studied as a good psycholinguistic measure of argument
structure processing. It is well documented that people tend to turn their gaze towards the
reference of the noun when they listen to a sentence; however, when they hear a verb in a
sentence, their gaze anticipates its arguments, i.e. the gaze is turned to the objects that are
references of the verb’s arguments. Although there is no agreement on the nature of the
processes that are reflected in the anticipatory gaze (whether they reflect syntactic processes
of argument structure building or semantic processes related to the meaning of the verb),
anticipatory eye movements correspond to the top–down processes in language processing.
In this study we measured anticipatory eye movements in two groups of children: children
with typical language development (TLD) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI).
In a listening paradigm the anticipatory gaze was recorded in two conditions: (1) with the last
word of the sentence (part of the argument structure of the verb) represented as a picture and
(2) with the last word of the sentence not represented on the screen. Instead, a picture that
represents a semantically related word was presented. The difference in the anticipatory eye
movements in the two groups of children was obtained. In the TLD group the average duration
of the anticipatory gaze was more than 2,5 s in the first (»syntactic«) condition, while shorter
in the second (»semantic«) condition (≈2 s). In the SLI group the anticipatory eye movements
were shorter in the »syntactic« condition (1,4 s) and slightly longer in the »semantic« condition
(1,6 s). This pattern of results reveals the difference in language processing in the two groups
of participants: while children with TLD use the syntactic information in sentence structure
building in a top–down processing, children with SLI rely on the semantic information as a
compensation strategy for their language difficulty.

Keywords

anticipatory eye movements; children with Specific Language Impairment; language development; language processing

Hrčak ID:

62326

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/62326

Publication date:

17.12.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

Visits: 2.216 *