Language Development Lab, SDSU Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

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Language Development Lab


	The CNL studies SLI and non-SLI children.

Specific Language Impairment

Most children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have mixed receptive and expressive deficits while demonstrating intact general cognitive abilities. These delays place children approximately two years behind their chronologically aged-matched peers while demonstrating generally intact cognitive abilities. There are no obvious neurological reasons to explain these delays (such as lesions, history of traumatic brain injury, etc), although intriguing structural differences are emerging. There are a number of hypotheses about the underlying basis for specific language impairment, ranging from claims that it is general processing resources that limit their language ability (Leonard, 1989) to claims that it is rate of presentation that disrupts language processing (Tallal et al, 1996).

Currently, the tests and measures used to assess language ability have been largely limited to elicited production, leaving the detailed assessment of the process of comprehension abilities unattainable. While current methods largely tell us about the success or failure of final comprehension, they are insufficiently sensitive to reveal critical details of on-going comprehension.

The CNL's current research with SLI children aims at detailing the moment-by-moment, temporal course of information integration during language comprehension. This research spans the lexical and structural levels of language processing. I am currently involved in research that manipulates a number of behavioral (theoretically driven) parameters (including memory and rate of speech) to examine their effect upon lexical and structural processing. Ultimately, by understanding the real-time performance and the parameters involved in the comprehension process, we can better distinguish among the several hypotheses that currently exist.

The CNL's research with unimpaired children using on-line paradigms has investigated both lexical and structural processing during auditory comprehension. Results from these studies have revealed that children as young as four years of age demonstrate contextually independent exhaustive access of words with multiple meanings (BANK money or river) and they also demonstrate a structural reflex when parsing complex (object-relative) constructions .

Participate in our Developmental Language Studies! (.pdf, 83 kb)

Spring 2008 Newsletter (.pdf, 1.7 MB)