Relationship between working memory and complex syntax in children with Developmental Language Disorder

作者：Hélène Delage, Ulrich Hans Frauenfelder · 发表于：Journal of Child Language · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.1017/s0305000919000722 · 被引用次数：76 · 研究领域：Language Development and Disorders、Reading and Literacy Development、Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Some theories of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) explain the linguistic deficits observed in terms of limitations in non-linguistic cognitive systems such as working memory. The goal of this research is to clarify the relationship between working memory and the processing of complex sentences by exploring the performance of 28 French-speaking children with DLD aged five to fourteen years and 48 typically developing children of the same age in memory and linguistic tasks. We identified predictive relationships between working memory and the comprehension and repetition of complex sentences in both groups. As for syntactic measures in spontaneous language, it is the complex spans that explain the major part of the variance in the control children. In children with DLD, however, simple spans are predictive of these syntactic measures. Our results thus reveal a robust relationship between working memory and syntactic complexity, with clinical implications for the treatment of children with DLD.