Shanju Lin & Amanda J. Owen Van Horne Dept of Communication Sciences and Disorders & DeLTA Center

University of Iowa

Attending to & describing motion events in children with SLI

Introduction

1. Do children with SLI attend to and describe same motion elements as their TD peers?

2. If there are attentional biases in children with SLI, are those biases associated with description biases?

Research Questions

7724

Motion events• One object moves with respect to another object. Talmy, 1975,

1985

Children with TD• Cognition and language of motion events are early developed.

- 18-month-olds detect object, trajectory, and the whole motion.Raskin & Poulin-Dubois, 2002

- By age 3, language-specific expressions are learned.Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Sebastián & Slobin, 1994

• Regardless of language and age, speakers show similar perception for motion elements. Gennari et al., 2002, Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep;

Papafragou et al., 2002, Papafragou & Selimis, 2010

• Amount of information included in motion description increases with age.Chen & Guo, 2010; Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep; Slobin, 2004

Children with SLI• Often described as having a gap between their linguistic and cognitive abilities

• Use more general-all-purpose (GAP) verbs (e.g., come, go) rather than specific verbs expressing manner or path (e.g., jump, enter) Rice & Bode, 1993

• Have weaker semantic representations for verbs McGregor et al., 2012

• Have different biases • when interpreting novel verbs: result-oriented interpretation, rather than

motion interpretation Kelly & Rice, 1994

• when learning verb argument structures: more errors for change-of-state verbs (e.g., fill, cover) than change-of-location verbs (e.g., put, pour)

Ebbels, et al., 2007

Element Example

Manner run, walk, jump, fly, roll

Pathleave, exit, enter, through, over, under

Ground: Source & Goal

The boy jumped from the tree /to the ground.

• Involves cognition and language

• English speakers tend to describe motion events in manner verbs and use prepositional phrases for path, source and goal.

Manner Path Goal Source0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0MLU

SLI

AGE

Pro

po

rtio

n o

f e

lem

en

t m

en

tio

ne

d

Method

Description Coding

Participants M

(range)MLU SLI AGE

N 17 17 17

Age 4;7 (4;0 - 4;11)

7;1 (4;2 - 9;10)

7;1 (4;3 - 9;11)

MLUw 6.38 (5.30 - 7.74)

6.48 (5.42 - 7.5)

7.73 (5.04 - 10)

SPELT-3 113.82(100-127)

78.5 (73 – 86)

112.82(104 -122)

CELF-4 ELI

110.53(96 - 130)

69.89(51 - 85)

113.94(93 - 130)

KBIT - 2 104.76(92 – 130)

95.18(80 – 130)

113(89 - 130)

Stimuli• Categorization task: Which of two change videos goes with the baseline video?

Example # Elements Elements

He is driving to the swing. 2 Manner, Goal

The ant go to the truck. 1 Goal

The pig flew under the bridge and flew to the castle. 3 Manner, Path, Goal

The airplane go underneath the net and then he go to the balloon so he can pop them.

2 Path, Goal

Results

Baseline

Manner Change Goal Change

MannerNonvehicle jump, walk, roll

Vehicledrive a car, ride a motorcycle, fly an airplane

Path Middle object over, under, through

Source & Goal

2 of each present in each baseline. Minimal pairs switched locations, not items.

24 triads of videos

Change videos:

Differ minimally from the baseline on Manner, Path, Source, or Goal to examine element bias/priority

• Description task: Describe the 24 baseline videos

Categorization task

Description task

MLU SLI AGE0

1

2

3

4

1.621.97

2.59

Avg. number of elements men-tioned*

*

SLI & MLU-matches both tended to mention between 1 & 2 motion elements.

Age-matches: between 2 & 3

• Compared to AGE group, SLI group are less likely to describe Source (and marginal for Manner)

• SLI group show a strong Goal Bias• The chicken wented to the swingset. • The ant goed to the truck.

MLU group show a strong Manner Bias• A hippo was driving a car.• A pig was flying.

• AGE group talk about Path, Goal, and Source more than MLU group.

F(2,48)=9.489, p < .001, η2 = 0.28SLI < AGE, p = .003MLU < AGE, p < .001SLI = MLU, p = .383

Group: F(2,48)=9.491, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.283

SLI < AGE, p = .003, MLU < AGE, p < .001Element: F(3,144)=36.428, p < .001, ηp

2 = 0.431 M = P = G > S (S vs. other, p < .001)Group x Element: F(6,144)=4.744, p < .001, ηp

2 = 0.165 Manner: SLI < MLU, p = .02 SLI = AGE, p = .134 Path: AGE > MLU, p = .006 Goal: SLI > MLU, p = .003 AGE > MLU, p = .001 Source: SLI < AGE, p = .003

MLU < AGE, p = .003 All other group comparisons n.s. all p >.17

**

**

*

*

Element Bias: F(3,201)=90.230, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.574

S < M, P, G, p < .001; G < M, P, p < .05 M = P, p > .99 Group x Element Bias: F(9,201)=2.258, p = .02, ηp

2 = 0.091 Goal: SLI > AGE, p = .046; SLI > MLU, p = .044 Source: SLI < MLU, p = .041; AGE < MLU, p = .01 All other group comparisons n.s., p > .103Group: F(3,67)=0.073, p = .974

**

**

• All children fail to notice Source changes or consider them less relevant.

• SLI group show a stronger Goal bias.

• MLU group show a stronger Source bias, but not stronger than other element biases.

Tasks adapted from Papafragou et al. (2002) & Gennari et al. (2002)

Manner Path Goal Source0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

MLUSLIAGE

Pro

po

rtio

n f

or

ele

me

nt

bia

s

Conclusions

AcknowledgementsWe thank Karla McGregor, Bob McMurray, Word learning Lab, and MACLab at the University of Iowa for help and comments on the experimental design and stimuli. We also thank Allison Haskill at Augustana College, Betty Merrifield and the Scottish Rite Program, and Grantwood AEA for all the help with this project, and the members of Grammar Acquisition Lab at University of Iowa for data collection. This project is funded by a Pre-doctoral Scholarship from Ministry of Education, Taiwan awarded to Shanju Lin, and a University of Iowa Internal Funding Initiative awarded to Amanda J. Owen Van Horne.

Contacts: shan-ju-lin@uiowa.edu, amanda-owen-vanhorne@uiowa.edu

• Children with SLI attend to and talk about different motion elements compared to their TD peers.

- Children with SLI show attentional biases on goal, which is consistent with the fact that their responses tend to include goal also.

- They rely heavily on GAP verbs, making it less likely that they mention manner.

• Goal is perceptually salient to children with SLI and thus may lead weaker representations of manner verbs.

- Goal represents a final reference point and is often more persistent in the stimuli.

- Following Kelly & Rice (1993), children with SLI may have different attentional biases such that they notice results, which change their verb learning profiles.

- Following Ebbels et al. (2007), children with SLI show weaker semantic representations of change-of-state verbs than change-of-location verbs

• We hypothesize that weak verb representations (McGregor, et al., 2012) in children with SLI may be related to language deficits and attentional biases.

- If children with SLI do not attend equally well to some elements in events, their representations of elements like manner might be relatively weak and less likely to be associated with a verb.

Clinical Implications• Teach verbs and test children’s verb use in more complex contexts, e.g., multiple

motion elements

• Direct children’s attention to manner when teaching motion verbs

• Teach manner verbs with various prepositional phrases (over, under, from, to, etc)

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Works Cited