Effect of semantic inconsistency on sentence grammaticality judgements for children with and without language-learning disabilities

Abstract

The effect of semantic inconsistency on performance of an auditory sentence grammaticality judgement task was investigated with 69 school-age children with and without language-learning disabilities (LD). Children judged the grammatical correctness of semantically consistent sentences; for example, She had lovely catlike eyes and *The catlike wouldn’t stop purring (where * indicates an ungrammatical sentence). They also judged the correctness of semantically inconsistent sentences; for example, The catlike corn wasn’t picked and *They flew through the catlike. Children with and without LD showed high accuracy in correctly identifying grammatically correct sentences that were semantically consistent, but showed substantially lower accuracy in identifying sentences as grammatical when they were semantically inconsistent. Although semantic inconsistency affected identification of ungrammatical sentences for each group, the effect was significantly greater for LD children than for their typically-developing (TD) peers. In identifying both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, the LD children’s performance was similar to a group of younger, typically-developing children with comparable language skills (i.e., children matched for raw score on a test of language abilities). The finding that children’s task performance can be affected by competing linguistic demands within the task is interpreted within a limited capacity, interactionist perspective of language impairment.