Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T15:05:03.068Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2008

JANET L. McDONALD
JANET L. McDONALD*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
*
Address for correspondence: Janet L. McDonald, Department of Psychology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA. Tel: (225) 578-4116. Fax: (225) 578-4125. e-mail: psmcdo@lsu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n=68) and adults (n=19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed early mastery of some grammatical structures (e.g. word order, article omissions) while even the oldest children differed from adults on others (e.g. past tense, third person singular agreement). Working memory capacity and phonological ability accounted for variance in grammaticality judgments above and beyond age effects. In particular, working memory capacity correlated with structures involving verb morphology and word order; phonological ability was important for structures with low phonetic substance. Children's relative difficulty with the different constructions showed parallels to adult performance under memory load stress, indicating working memory capacity may be a limiting factor in their performance. Implications for performance by memory and phonologically impaired populations are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 247 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from Louisiana State University to the author. A preliminary version of this data was presented at the 45th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN. I thank Chase Faucheaux, Patrick Johnson, Stephanie Peterson and Marie Nebel-Schwalm for help in gathering the data. Thanks also to the children and parents who participated, and the University Lab School and Trinity Episcopal School for their help.

References

Blackwell, A. & Bates, E. (1995). Inducing agrammatic profiles in normals: Evidence for the selective vulnerability of morphology under cognitive resource limitation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7, 228–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowey, J. A. (2005). Grammatical sensitivity: Its origins and potential contribution to early word reading skill. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 90, 318–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 12, 335–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, M. V. (1989). Children's over-regularization of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language 16, 203–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
deVilliers, P. A. & deVilliers, J. (1972). Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 1, 299–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dick, F., Bates, E. & Ferstl, E. C. (2003). Spectral and temporal degradation of speech as a simulation of morphosyntactic deficits in English and German. Brain & Language 85, 535–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dick, F., Bates, E., Wulfeck, B., Utman, J. A., Dronkers, N. & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2001). Language deficits, localization, and grammar: Evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in aphasic patients and neurologically intact individuals. Psychological Review 108, 759–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Donaldson, W. (1992). Measuring recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121, 275–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eadie, P. A., Fey, M. E., Douglas, J. M. & Parsons, C. L. (2002). Profiles of grammatical morphology and sentence imitation in children with specific language impairment and Down syndrome. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45, 720–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ellis Weismer, S., Evans, J. & Hesketh, L. J. (1999). An examination of verbal working memory capacity in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42, 1249–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gaulin, C. A. & Campbell, T. F. (1994). Procedure for assessing verbal working memory in normal school-age children: Some preliminary data. Perceptual and Motor Skills 79, 55–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldschneider, J. M. & DeKeyser, R. M. (2005). Explaining the ‘natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition’ in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants. Language Learning 55, 27–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottardo, A., Stanovich, K. E. & Siegel, L. S. (1996). The relationships between phonological sensitivity, syntactic processing, and verbal working memory in the reading performance of third-grade children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 63, 563–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F., Calderón, J. & Ellis Weismer, S. (2004). Verbal working memory in bilingual children. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 47, 863–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hakes, D. T. (1980). The development of metalinguistic abilities in children. Berlin: Springer Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J. & Barkhuysen, P. N. (2006). Language production and working memory: The case of subject-verb agreement. Language and Cognitive Processes 21, 181–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayiou-Thomas, M. E., Bishop, D. V. M. & Plunkett, K. (2004). Simulating SLI: General cognitive processing stressors can produce a specific linguistic profile. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, 1347–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kail, M. (2004). On-line grammaticality judgments in French children and adults: A crosslinguistic perspective. Journal of Child Language 31, 713–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kay-Raining, Bird E. & Chapman, R. S. (1994). Sequential recall in individuals with Down Syndrome. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37, 1369–80.Google Scholar
Kilborn, K. (1991). Selective impairment of grammatical morphology due to induced stress in normal listeners: Implications for aphasia. Brain & Language 41, 275–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
King, J. & Just, M. A. (1991). Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory & Language 30, 580–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laws, G. & Bishop, D. V. M. (2003). The comparison of language abilities in adolescents with Down syndrome and children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 46, 1324–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marton, K. & Schwartz, R. G. (2003). Working memory capacity and language processes in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 46, 1138–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDonald, J. L. (2006). Alternatives to the Critical Period Hypothesis: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory & Language 55, 381–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, J. W. (2000 a). Relation of working memory to off-line and real time sentence processing in children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 117–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, J. W. (2000 b). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 43, 293–308.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montgomery, J. W. & Leonard, L. B. (1998). Real time inflectional processing by children with specific language impairment: Effects of phonetic substance. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 41, 1432–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, P., Kohnert, K., Sabur, S. & Shaw, D. (2005). Classroom noise and children learning through a second language: Double jeopardy? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 36, 219–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J. (2005). Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with specific language impairment. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools 36, 172–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollack, I. & Norman, D. A. (1964). A non-parametric analysis of recognition experiments. Psychonomic Science 1, 125–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Redmond, S. M. & Rice, M. L. (2001). Detection of irregular verb violations by children with and without SLI. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44, 655–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L. & Wexler, K. (1996). Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English speaking children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39, 1239–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K. & Cleave, P. (1995). Specific language impairment as a period of extended optional infinitive. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 38, 850–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M., Wexler, K. & Redmond, S. M. (1999). Grammaticality judgments of an extended optional infinitive grammar: evidence from English speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42, 943–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sutter, J. C. & Johnson, C. J. (1990). School-age children's metalinguistic awareness of grammaticality in verb form. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 33, 84–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vos, S. H., Gunter, T. C., Schriefers, H. & Friederici, A. D. (2001). Syntactic parsing and working memory: The effects of syntactic complexity, reading span, and concurrent load. Language and Cognitive Processes 16, 65–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, K. (1994). Optional infinitives, head movement and the economy of derivation in child grammar. In Lightfoot, D. & Hornstein, N. (eds) Verb movement, 305–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wulfeck, B. (1993). A reaction time study of grammaticality judgments in children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 1208–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wulfeck, B., Bates, E., Krupa-Kwiatkowski, M. & Saltzman, D. (2004). Grammaticality sensitivity in children with early focal brain injury and children with specific language impairment. Brain & Language 88, 215–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed